Aretha Franklin has been called the Queen of Soul since she demanded Respect in 1967. That’s a lot of years to be regal and I suppose you can’t expect someone who is constantly revered not to feel a little distant from the world, a little divaish.
Her new album after all is called Aretha Franklin Sings The Great Diva Classics. Things like I Will Survive, People, You Keep Me Hanging On, and I Am Every Woman mashed up with Respect. Basically an album where she out divas every other diva.
It’s a compelling album. Her voice on it at 72 is not effortless. It no longer swoops and soars with dexterity, but instead it delivers something else, something that shows struggle, grit, terrifying emotional strength and triumph.
Of course I was excited to meet the diva of all divas. She rarely gives interviews. She hates giving interviews. For a large chunk of time she hated leaving her house.
Her last album with Arista Records – the company that first released her – was in 2003. Sure, there was a Christmas album after that merely to fulfil a contract and in 2011 there was a studio album made for Wal-Mart stores. But the Diva album is a proper return with music impresario Clive Davis at its helm.
The album has been generally applauded, as has her refreshed energy and weight loss. For some of those silent years where no one saw her it’s been said that she became huge. Her weight ballooned in the 90s after she stopped smoking because it was hurting her voice.
Last year she had a mysterious illness and undisclosed medical treatment. She came back after it fitter and thinner. Certainly there was a sense she was ready to take on the world again. What I wasn’t ready for was to take her on.
The interview had been on and off several times in several locations. Over a period of weeks. Finally it happens- within an hour of it being confirmed I find myself en route to Detroit, to the suburb of Southfield and the Westin Hotel, close to her home.
The interview is to be at 7.30pm. Would I go down and meet her to try to charm her? There was a fear the interview would be cut to ten minutes. Of course I would. At that time I didn’t realise she was uncharm-able.
It turns out she didn’t want to meet me first. She wanted to do the interview at 8.30pm, so I decided I would take a restorative bath. Five minutes in the bath I get a call she wants to do the interview now. Still wet I drag on clothes to meet her in the lobby. As the lift door opens and I go to get out she gets in.
She is wearing a black leather blouse, black trousers, black and gold trainers and a zebra print rucksack. She looks a little plus-sized but you don’t see her as fat, you see her as a presence. I would guess she’d be a UK size 16-18.
I wasn’t there at the exact time. Had she decided to leave completely? Was she angry? Will she come back? A few tense moments. Apparently she will come back and she will give me as close to my full hour as possible. The PR warns that I should ask any important questions first which does not bode well because you can’t really ask first off: Are you an emotional eater? What pain were you trying to bury? You can’t ask who in fact was the father of the son you had when you were 14? Or the next son a couple of years later?
You can’ t say how did it feel when your first husband Ed White used to rough you up and why did she want that bit deleted from her autobiography.
Her father was a super preacher who had a turbulent marriage with her mother who left when Aretha was six and died shortly before her 10th birthday. Just after her mother’s death Aretha began singing at her father’s sermons. She debuted with the hymn Jesus Be A Fence Around Me. That fence never came down. Can you even begin to ask her why? No, you cannot.
People become interviewers because they want to ask the questions we all want answers for. Asking questions requires a kind of fearlessness which has always come naturally to me. I have faced plenty of divas – pop stars, prime ministers and wannabe presidents. None of them have awed me. There’s something about Aretha. She’s absolutely terrifying.
I’ve seen her on TV interviews making mincemeat of fawning reporters. One look, an ever so slight roll of the eyes, reduces them to gibberish.
We are in the grand ballroom of the semi chi chi hotel. Me and Aretha poised opposite on low under-stuffed armchairs. There is her son, her granddaughter, a record company person, the British PR, and another man to whom I was not introduced.
There is a sort of wall around her. Later I learn from the staff at this hotel where she regularly comes often for omelettes they have dubbed her The Wall. One staff member who begged not to be identified says, ‘You just can’t get through to her and she makes everyone feel scared. It’s hard to be normal with her. Once I asked her son for tickets to her show but he said even he was afraid to ask her.’
Aretha is sat in front of me with the beginning of an eye roll and I am afraid, I am petrified. But unlike the song I Will Survive I fear I won’t. I tell her that her album is great. And it is. ‘Uh-hmm,’ she says.
I tell her when Sinead O’Connor sang Nothing Compares 2 U you felt she was going to kill herself, but when Aretha sings it with her own lines added, that not even ‘a strawberry sundae or ham hocks and greens, or roller skates or garlic toast,’ compare, you feel she is expressing triumph and joy and power. ‘Uh-hmm,’ she says, which I’ve come to learn is Aretha’s very succinct way of expressing what she feels which is that I’m full of shit.
She tells me, ‘That was Andre 3000’s idea to take the tempo up and just refresh that song.’
I tell her that on I Will Survive she sounds particularly empowered. ‘No. That was the basic thing that Gloria Gaynor did. Then we mashed it up with I’m A Survivor (Destiny’s Child) which is one of my granddaughter Victorie’s favourite songs. So I said “Hey, let’s put that there”.’
Victorie is here with us. I think she’s about 17. Hair in a ponytail and a striped T-shirt. ‘Victorie is going to be a singer. Every time I type her name in my phone it comes up Victories with an s. Maybe she’s going to have some victories. I hope so. I’m taking her there. I’m mentoring her. She performed for me on the BET tribute.
Does she coach her because she sees herself in her, because they have a special bond? Her eyes swivel and look through me. ‘I coach her because she’s my granddaughter and she wants to sing.’
I laugh nervously.
‘I’ve been around a while, so in terms of coaching her as a vocalist why not, hmmm? I did have vocal coaching at one time when I was a teenager and I was also taught choreography by Charlie Atkins who taught most of the Motown artists.’
I’d read that she wanted to be a dancer at some point. ‘Well, I could have been a prima ballerina. I took classes at the Academy of Ballet where I would do plies, semi-plies, grand plies.’
The barre workout is very popular now. Is that what she does for exercise? ‘No. Really. Is that what people do?’ She looks incredulous. ‘I walk. I have my fitness regime where I walk the big superstores. – K-Mart and Wal-Mart. I walk the whole store. Sometimes twice if it’s not a superstore. I don‘t do it with the cart. Security people mind the cart and I do the walking.’
Do fans recognise her and come up to her? ’Sometimes.’ Pause. Do they ask her to sign something? ‘Yes. Peaches or a lettuce.’ We laugh. ‘They are usually very nice and they want an autograph or a selfie.’
She smiles sweetly and for a moment she seems relaxed so I ask her why was there a period of no albums for a while? ‘Because I was between record companies and during that time I did a lot of concerts. I noticed somebody the other day, I’m trying to think who it was, and they said they hadn’t recorded for nine years, and I understood that perfectly. I love recording, but if you’re in concert as much as I was you’re just not thinking about it and of course you’re minding the store at home. I have four children, so that’s what was consuming my time.’
This puzzles me. Her four children, all boys, or rather men, are fully grown up. The oldest, Clarence Franklin, is in his late fifties, followed by Edward Franklin and Ted White Jnr., who by all accounts is a wonderful kind person, and Kecalf Cunningham, a musician who is known professionally as KPoint.
I want to ask her about why she still feels she needs to look after them but this is the first time in our interview there’s not been a silence. It’s been question, answer, silence. Her talking about walking the superstores is the nearest thing we’ve got to a conversation.
‘I love walking the superstore. You can shop, pick up things you need, and it’s good exercise.’
What is her favourite thing to shop for? ‘I love beautiful things, beautiful clothes. Pretty much what the average woman likes.’
The silence returns suddenly. There is no twilight moment. No cooling down, segueing in. There’s warm friendly and then cold silence. This is not your average woman. So I change the subject. She grew up near here, then moved to New York and Los Angeles.
‘Well, I had to come back to Detroit because of the incident that happened to my dad.’ She had been performing in Las Vegas when she got the news in 1979 that her father Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, known as CL Franklin, was shot twice at point blank range in his Detroit home. He spent six months in hospital and was returned home needing round the clock nursing care. ‘I came back to stay with him and my sisters and my brother so we could alternate looking after him.’
That must have been a terrible shock? ‘Yes.’ Long pause. Did they ever find out who did it? ‘They did and they were arrested.’ How did it happen, was it random or planned? ‘I couldn’t tell you, but let’s move on.’
Now there’s not just a silence but a silence with pins and needles in it. She was always extremely close to her father. ‘Yes, of course, sure. I travelled as a young featured vocalist. I would sing before he preached.’
I’ve read that his sermons were mesmerising, it was like going to a concert. ‘No. I would not say it was like a concert at all. My dad was a theologian and he ministered the congregation, very enlightening and educational.’ He had a compelling speaking voice? ‘Oh yes. He was famous for that.’ He recorded 39 volumes of sermons and he was quite the singer as well.’
Is she like him? ‘You could say that with respect to certain things.’ She was a daddy’s girl? ‘You could say that.’
And he had great friends? ‘Yes. Dinah Washington, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Dr King. These people came into the city to perform on Saturdays and on Sundays knowing about his sermons came to our church.’
I want to know more about what it’s like growing up with all these legends and how does this compare to our modern divas like Beyoncé and Miley but before I can say the word twerk my throat closes up. I know she’s not going to talk about these things, I just know, and I’ve never had that feeling in an interview before.
I wonder if she too is afraid. When I heard that she was terrified of flying it seemed ridiculous that an artist of her magnitude with her 18 Grammys and over 75 million records sold and her constant breaking of Billboard records should have any fears at all. She is a legend.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ she says, almost savouring the moment that I’ve grasped she has fear. ‘Aretha is a woman like every other woman. Everyone has something.’ She looks at me sweetly. ‘I flew for 21 years and it’s just ridiculous for me not to fly. I’ve started working on it. One of these days you’ll see me back in London.’
Will she take a boat? ‘I don’t think so. There’s too much water. I’ll take eight hours on the Jumbo jet. I am thinking about that.’
What happened to create this fear? ‘A bad flight. A small plane. Two engines. Up and down, up and down. And I decided I would not fly again. I was not happy. Not a happy camper.’
It is at this point it strikes me Aretha has the wall because she feels pain like no other. She had a bad flight. She decides she can’t bear it. And that will never happen again.
The wall is not so much a fortress but a place where she traps herself inside herself. The wall I think would have come anyway, due to the tragedies in her early life and how in order to be the Queen of Soul she is the queen of sensitivity. Fame and being feted didn’t cause this wall, it just helped it stay in place.
‘I have a custom bus that I very much enjoy. I can go from city to city and see points of interest, get out and stretch my legs. If we go to California we have all these different things in the desert that you can see. I can do things on my bus that you can’t on a plane. You can’t stretch your legs at 30,000 feet.’
Does she have a bed on her bus? ‘No. I don’t want that. That’s too much bus. I get a good night’s sleep and then get back on the bus.’
Is it true the things she fears most are airplanes and interviews? ‘Where on earth did that come from? Never even heard that. Here we are in an interview and the planes as I said I’m working on it.’
Does she see a hypnotherapist? ‘No, no, no. I would never do that. I went to a fearless flyers class organised by US Air. I missed two classes. Last time I was standing at the gate when the rest of my class flew away because I’d missed a few lessons, but I am determined that I will graduate from that class. You do things like a rejected take-off where the plane goes down the runway, they start the propellers and everything, but then they stop and come back. We do that and actual classes where you watch films and find out a lot of things about planes.’ There’s another silence now.
Later on I speak to Versa Manos of Gorgeous Media Group. Manos was her PR at Arista Records 25 years ago. She looked after Aretha and Whitney Houston. I wonder was she like that then? ‘She is extremely sensitive, so if an interview becomes intimate or is about to discuss any of the big tragedies in her life it might make her cry, so it probably would be stopped before it got to that point.
‘She has had a very harsh early life. She expresses it in her voice all the time. Her detachment from the world is because she is so sensitive. That’s why she became slightly agoraphobic at some point.’
When she sang about demanding respect in 1967 it was when a black woman was rarely granted such a thing and now she is a legend she can demand it.
She sang for President Obama at his inauguration. ‘It was a tremendous moment. Certainly a historical one and I was delighted to be part of it. Throngs and throngs of people that morning as far as you could see. Unbelievable.’
She met him at Rosa Parks’ funeral. ‘Yes. That’s exactly where I met him. He was on his way out of the door and someone saw him leaving and said “Hey, Barack, you haven’t met Aretha and said hello.” He stopped, turned right round and came back. And that was a nice moment. He’s a very nice man. He’s very much in person as you see him on TV, charismatic.’
Did she maintain contact with him? ‘No, no, of course not.’ The eyes roll again. Did he ask her to sing again? ‘No. There is only one inauguration.’ But there’s a second term. ‘Oh. Well, how can that be an inauguration the second time? That’s not the same thing. The moment that was historical will only happen once in history and it happened when I sang the National Anthem. That’s the first time it ever happened. How can it happen again? I was there at one of the greatest moments in history. I was touched. That moment was the fruition for many who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly when we saw Reverend Jackson and there were tears flowing. I’m sure many, many things went through his mind, Dr King being one of them. It was the fruition of the hopes and dreams of a nation. Ah-hum,’ she says triumphantly. It’s an ah-hum that says her father would be very proud. ‘Ah-hum-hmm. Absolutely.
‘They were great friends Dr King and my dad. The march in Detroit was a precursor to the march in Washington. He actually did the “I have a dream” speech here before Washington. The applause was so thunderous the walls were shaking. There have been so many gains, but there’s certainly still a way to go.’
She says this with such passion I wonder how close she was to Dr King? ‘He was a guest of my dad’s.’ Not a personal friend? ‘Oh, please stop, definitely not. I understand exactly what you mean. None of that.’ She says this with a quiet ferocity, but then the moment passes and she becomes sweet again.
‘When he was a guest of Dad’s in our home we had a housekeeper who I used to call Catherine the Great because she was such a great cook. She asked Dr King what he would like for breakfast. Bacon, omelette, grits, or sorjetses because she couldn’t say sausages. Dr King thought for a moment and he says, ‘Well Catherine, I’ll have some bacon and I’ll have some of that sorjetses. He was such a gracious man he didn’t make fun of the moment or try to correct her, he just went along with it.’
At this point a voice comes in and says the interview must stop but Aretha is having none of it. ‘I love cooking. I do a great chicken and dressing and I do good spaghetti and omelettes. I also like banana puddings and peach cobbler. You know, these days I just very lightly taste. I don’t over taste when I’m cooking. If you mess up there you can gain a lot of weight. My favourite food to eat and cook and the most difficult thing for me to give up was ham hocks and greens. I just love ham hocks and greens.’
Maybe she should just stick to the greens? ‘Well no, I’d rather have the ham hocks with a little hot sauce, some cornbread. What could be better?’
A voice cries out, “The interview must stop.” Aretha says, ‘No. Let’s have another give minutes. She came all this way.’
So this is the even weirder thing. The minute she knows the interview is going to end she doesn’t want it. She becomes relaxed and super chatty. She tells me there are three deals on the table for the biopic movie of her life. ‘There might be Audrey MacDonald, Jennifer Hudson, or a gospel unknown playing myself. I don’t know yet.’
What about Alicia Keys? Aretha covers Keys’ No One on the Divas album so I thought there might be a connection. ‘That’s so interesting,’ she says animated. ‘There a possibility of Shonda Rhimes (writer and producer of Grey’s Anatomy) writing it. Uh-hmm,’ she says savouring it. Would she control the script? ‘I would certainly have edit approval and I don’t think you could beat that except maybe with the ham hocks.’ She giggles.
Her posse want the interview to finish and now we have passed a few sticky moments I think Aretha doesn’t want it to finish. The hot and cold is perplexing.
I ask her if we can have a picture. I sit on the floor before her and it looks as I am kneeling at the feet of a queen. ‘Do stop with that,’ she says. ‘There’s only one Queen, your Queen, and she’s still handling it. I really admire that Queen of yours. Such maturity from such a young age, and such great walking shoes.’
The tape recorder is off now and she is much more relaxed. She wonders if the Queen walks around the palace maybe as she walks around the superstore. She admires my eye make-up, which is dark and glittery, just like her eye make-up, which is dark and glittery.
Suddenly there’s an incredible warmth to her, or maybe it’s relief that I’m going. Puzzled I speak to Roger Friedman, Showbiz411.com columnist and friend of Franklin. Sometimes she’s sweet, sometimes she’s not.
‘Yes,’ he concedes. ‘She can be a puzzle.’ He tells me that changing her mind about interview dates and times is just because she changes her mind a lot and nothing more should be read into it. He tells me that she comes to New York to learn classical piano and teaches her teacher gospel piano in return.
‘A critic in the New York Times had accused her of using Auto-Tune on her Divas album. I asked her if this was true. I heard her ask, “Do we use Auto-Tune in the car?” She had no idea what it was. Of course she doesn’t use Auto-Tune.
‘What you have to remember is Aretha is a living legend. James Brown is gone, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald. She wanted to do this album as they were her idols. It’s so easy to make fun of celebrities. They are so daffy or whatever. But we have to appreciate who we’ve got and what they mean to us. Every singer wants to be Aretha Franklin and they never will be. She is singular. She can still make an album with all the trills and whoops and everything she adds that no one else can do. It’s easy to make fun of her as she is the ultimate diva, but all the other divas who are legends are dead. We have to treat her with respect now.’
She is indeed the ultimate diva and respect is something she not only demands, but has earned.

I arrive at Robert Downey Jr’s four-storey headquarters in Venice, California. I use the word headquarters for many reasons. Firstly – there’s a sense that team Downey is running to change the world, taking on interesting projects with verve and enthusiasm. Secondly – it’s far too spectacular to be called an office.

Downey is wearing a T-shirt and sweats. He is fresh from the gym. He is a mixture of calm and perky. He tells me the building used to belong to a British photographer and as we wind our way upstairs past various warrens and the workforce, he shows me his son Exton’s playroom which used to be ‘the playboy suite where the photographer would take all of his models and then they would shower in the opaque glass shower room.’
Upstairs where there used to be a swimming pool it is now a sundeck, pillows and day beds, a kitchen and a dining area where Downey’s chef Charles makes us a wonderful lunch as healthy as it is exquisite – avocado, seaweed, heirloom tomatoes. ‘Did you like the movie?’ Downey asks, with only a hint of nervousness.
I did like it. I laughed. I cried. I loved the Downey/Duvall chemistry. Duvall hid everything on the inside and Downey threw out every minutiae of feeling.
The Judge is the first team Downey production. (Downey stars and his wife Susan is at the production helm). A radical contrast to all things Iron Man and The Avengers. It sees Downey – who it is said is the highest earning actor in the world reputedly collecting between $50 and $75 million per movie – returning to the style of acting where he first started Off-Broadway. It is dialogue driven, a story about coming to terms with his life via its emotional history and clashes with his father. It stars Downey as an ambitious, clever lawyer, a chancer who is a master manipulator of the law and Robert Duvall as his father the judge, upstanding, harsh but fair. The man with whom he has an impenetrable rift.
It was a powerful and emotional script. What drew him to it? ‘I wanted to make it so that we couldn’t think about doing any other movie but this. I was the only fixed element of the casting.’ He pauses toying with a piece of teriyaki chicken. ‘These days I hear things like “We’re going to have a chemistry test between so and so and so.”’
Has he ever done a chemistry test? ‘I think they weren’t calling it that then.’ It’s true that he had to audition for Iron Man. The story of his own life reads like a superhero transformation. Downey was always brilliant but troubled, self-destructive. He was in the news with various drug charges, even a stint in jail and in 1999 a term at the California Substance Abuse Facility Center.
He came back in 2003 with a brilliant portrayal of The Singing Detective, a movie for which the only way he could be insured was due to the generosity of his friend Mel Gibson. After a number of well received movies including A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and A Scanner Darkly. He came back into mainstream lovability with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. But Iron Man of course was the big comeback, the fanfare, all singing and all dancing. The Downey that everyone loved.
‘A chemistry test is something to try and find the thing that (Gwyneth) Paltrow and I have in Iron Man. It’s something where you have to think this movie is going to work because of you two.
‘I’d seen Duvall in a movie called Get Low and I thought wow. I want to be able to hold down a movie for an hour and a half then have a five-minute monologue at the end that is actually the highlight of the movie. He’s a powerhouse.’
Indeed, there’s already talk of Duvall getting an Oscar nomination for The Judge. It’s a movie with deep emotional resonance for many people, especially those who may have a strained relationship with a parent and enjoy the catharsis of a way in to mend a rift. I wonder if Downey found inspiration for his performance from his relationship with his father Robert Downey Sr, an underground film maker who when they were growing up on the East Coast often included Downey Jr in his work. He made his acting debut at the age of five playing a sick puppy in the absurdist comedy Pound (1970). And then at seven appeared in Greaser’s Palace. His mother Elsie Ford once played 17 different characters in the movie Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight.
I remember him telling me that once when he was young and broke and needed $2 his father wouldn’t give it to him. He said at the time that he respected that and it helped make him who he is. That had shocked me.
‘I’m glad I was feeling so expansive at the time.’ There’s a pause and a raised eyebrow lost in thought. ‘My father was trying to make a point; that there’s no handouts. I think there are elements in any father that are similar and others not. Duvall doesn’t have any kids. Isn’t that interesting?’
Did it take him back to his childhood and parents? A pause. ‘Everybody got something out of this shoot for some reason. I don’t know why it’s so cathartic for me to speak about it. The first thing I learnt in acting class at Santa Monica High School was that you have to have an aesthetic distance from what you are doing. And then my buddies at Strasberg’s were all telling me how they were vastly growing as artists. But what I learned at high school seemed very practical. You are a liability if you’re out there turning the role into therapy. And by the way I know some people who need to do this. Everything has to have deep resonance for them. But no. I was there dressed in a suit and dressing like a dad and if you’re with good professional folks it’s really easy to create a false reality.
‘Susan was there with Exton. Charles was there (his chef). So I’d be sitting with the food and rocking him to sleep. More than any movie I’ve ever done I think this is good. I can’t wait to see it with an audience again. I’ve never been in a movie where so many people had something to tell me right after they saw it, how and why it impacted them. And I really appreciate that. I think there’s been some pixie dust on this project. We all would get emotional talking about it. And although I wasn’t thinking about my dad it’s almost there like a wave, like that sound machine that puts kids to sleep. This movie allows you to feel safe and entertained.’
What is even more strange about this movie is another way that art has imitated life. The starting point for the movie is when Downey’s character must take the trip back home for his mother’s funeral.
‘Because of what just happened recently it’s very much an art imitates life movie.’
Downey’s mother Elsie Ann Ford died just three days before our interview. He shows me his desk which is placed opposite his wife’s desk. Susan’s is full of work in progress. On his desk is a black and white picture of his mother in a check 1950s dress and a nipped in waist. Her eyebrows are slightly vulpine and arched and her dark eyes pierce out of the photo frame. His eyes are her eyes. He nods that he was a lot like her.
He doesn’t want to talk about her. He says, ‘That’s what’s called a boundary.’ He wrote it all down in a moving tribute about how she dropped out of college and moved to New York with dreams of becoming a comedian. She met and married Downey Sr and had two children and worked in her husband’s movies. The marriage fell apart. Her acting career already suffering due to her alcohol addiction. Downey Jr lived with her and her boyfriend Jonas Kerr who became a second father in a two room five storey walk-up in Manhattan. She finally got sober in 1990.
“When I strived to have the kind of success that eluded her my own addiction repeatedly forbade it. in the summer of 2004 I was in bad shape. She called me out of the blue and I admitted everything. I don’t remember what she sang. I haven’t drank or used since.”
His tribute continues: “My ambition, tenacity, loyalty, moods, grandiosity, occasional passive aggression and my faith, that’s all her.”
Elsie moved to Los Angeles to be with Downey and to be a grandmother but was plagued by health problems. She suffered a cardiac arrest in March and was put on life support. Her wish was to be left to die if there wasn’t a reasonable chance of recovery. She came back from that completely lucid, then had a further set of seizures. She was 80 when she died.
He ended his tribute saying, “If anyone out there has a mother and she’s not perfect, please call her and say you love her anyway.”
Today though he didn’t want to go there. You don’t get the sense of him hanging on by a thread, desperately holding himself together. He is the same sparky, personable, loveable self, but he is one of the greatest actors of his generation.
Death brings me on to life. Does he have a name for his baby girl? ‘No. With Exton it was really easy. I asked Susan do you have any eccentric uncles and she said, “Jay Exton Turner.” And we looked up Exton and it’s a town where a bunch of roads cross,’ he says enthusiastically.
What about his first son Indio, 19? ‘Indio is a town on the way to Palm Desert where Coachella happens.’
Indio was recently arrested on drugs charges. Is he doing okay? ‘I suspect he is. He’s in treatment. He’ll be home soon. He and I are extremely close. He’s a musician. He’s putting a new band together.’
He is resolutely bright when he talks about Indio. If there’s an apple and tree conversation he’s definitely not going to be having it.
‘I’ve noticed in journalism recently some changes. People pass away and the next minute somebody’s asked me what I think. It’s actually I just heard that and I’m trying to process it.’
He goes on to give various examples. Afterwards I realise it’s all about his mother.
The Judge though, very much asks many questions about the father son relationship. Downey Sr perhaps gave Downey Jr too much free rein. It’s often been written about that he introduced him to smoking weed when he was just a kid and in general they lived a very bohemian existence.
‘Yes, maybe too much free rein. The other thing that’s happened in the last couple of years is that people admit to me who had the same counter culture upbringing as I did, that they rebelled against it by becoming squares. They rebelled by becoming materially successful in a way that’s very above board.’
It’s hard to imagine Downey, who at one point seemed like the poster boy for rebellion as dreaming of being square. He is after all a man of great extremes, complex but at the same time easy going. He is now 49 and enjoying the regime of a marriage that is on careful and strong foundations. These days he enjoys boundaries.
‘I don’t think I aspire to it intentionally because I didn’t think I had a shot at it. I thought I deserved it but it probably would not happen. But from day to day my perspective changes.’
Downey’s life of course is constantly changing. The major catalyst to that change has been a strong woman who loves him. A producing partner that is also his wife Susan. She is about to give birth to their second child, a daughter. His own family unit is pure strength.
He tells me that he has been involved in helping organise a retrospective of his father’s underground movies and he will come out to California for the screenings. ‘I nudged it along because he will come out and it’s a great way to see him and talk about stuff. But in many ways Paul Thomas Anderson has been a better son to my dad than I have. He dropped off this little manila envelope of interviews he’s done with him when they were taking train rides together and there’s also a shot of my dad in a Life magazine, he’s probably about 30-years-old, he’s wearing a pea coat and a cowboy hat and it says “Robert Downey makes vile movies.”’ He laughs.
‘It’s interesting when you’re old enough to take a new objective approach looking at your parents, frame them in a way where you are actually taking yourself out of the equation and just look at the things that are true about their life.’
Is he close to him? ‘Medium close. But that’s 100 per cent because of distance. He’s a diehard New Yorker and I like LA.’
So while The Judge absolutely pivots on the father/son relationship, its aftermath sees Downey involved in creating a retrospective of his dad’s films.
So maybe The Judge did open some psychological doors? ‘Maybe,’ he says, still thinking. His eyes fix you but you can see wheels turning. ‘When I was in New York I would go to the cinema with him and the move would start and my dad would be “Let’s go. This is bullshit.” I walked out of more movies than I saw because my dad would deem that what they’d done he’d already seen and it was no good. So I just assumed that if my dad said so, he’d be the one to judge because he’s a movie guy. People say that his movies are revolutionary.’
Richard Attenborough was also a father figure to him and his recent death was a great loss. He talks about their last meeting. ‘I went to see him and Sheila. I was a little apprehensive so I brought Guy Ritchie with me. I felt like I had some closure and stuff to do. They were in an assisted living facility. When Beauvoir Lodge wound up being sold I felt they had no idea what the future would hold. I never thought there’d be a time when Lord and Lady wouldn’t be in the Lodge.
‘When I was doing The Avengers sequel I was staying in Richmond so I could pass by. If we got invited to Beauvoir Lodge, A) It meant we were going to have a lot of fun; B) We’d see his art collection. And there’d always be interesting people there. I didn’t know my last time would be my last time. I thought I’d be back again. But you never know when the last time is, do you? He was the greatest.’
Attenborough directed him in his first Oscar nominated performance Chaplin. Was he a nurturing director? Perhaps more nurturing than Downey Sr? ‘My dad is actually very affectionate, although nurturing is the wrong word. I definitely felt given the lifestyle he had making underground movies without a budget, he was kind. They went out of their way to have some sense of normalcy. And when I’m being intimate or snuggling with my kid I remember that I learnt that from my Dad; lots of saying I love you, lots of tucking into bed.
‘Attenborough was very different.’ He mimics Attenborough’s voice. ‘Darling… When it came down to who was in charge or who had authority he would put me through my paces. But less than anybody I ever knew he had no judgement on my glaring character defects.’
Downey falls into being hard on himself easily. It’s just something he does automatically and when I point it out he says, ‘OK. I don’t have any anymore…
‘But there was a minute during Chaplin before we started shooting where I thought he should let me rewrite the script. And I told him as much and I said you should come over because I’ve rewritten the script with someone you’ve never met and he was really pissed off.’
Why did he decide to rewrite the script? ‘We’re talking about the point of view of a scared shitless 26-year-old who was about to do something that was going to define him one way or another. There is nothing more entertaining than an actor who hasn’t started shooting. Anyway, Lord Attenborough was really f****** haughty about it and from the first day of shooting he worked me like a rib. I realised I would be going where he said, doing what he said. The working hard was fun. I really like harmony. I don’t need to get into spats with people. There was just that one and then he was sweet again through the whole thing.’
The Judge was shot in small towns in Massachusetts and that was resonant for him. ‘There was a time where we lived in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut near East Hampton. We lived at the end of a dirt road. We were only there for about two years and then we were in Upstate New York in Woodstock.’
‘Next up I’m developing a very absurd and heartfelt version of Pinocchio that I’m crazy about. It’s live action and I might play both Pinocchio and Geppetto. I like mainstream movies that are completely off the wall.’
I wonder if that’s how Downey sees himself; both mainstream and off the wall. It seems to fit. Iron Man made $582 million, and the franchise has grossed over 2 billion at the Box Office was certainly mainstream yet he imbued the character of Tony Stark with an uncommon amount of flair, verve and vulnerability.
Is there going to be an Iron Man 4? ‘Not that I’m aware of.’ Is that the end of Iron Man? ‘Not that I’m aware of.’ He just appears in Avengers movies? ‘Avengers was another opportunity but they’re not talking about Iron Man 4. I was kind of bombed out to tell the truth, but maybe they’ve got bigger fish to fry and I trust their overall vision. The funny thing about these genre movies is you’d think they were national secrets.’
The Avengers movie in 2012 was one of the biggest grossing in box office films in history at $1.52 billion, and while Downey was certainly ready to return to the more traditional character acting, I’m sure he’s very protective of Tony Stark. He often refers to the weekend when he auditioned for Iron Man as the weekend that changed his life entirely.
‘I’m sure that there’s an end game, a plan of how to wrap up the whole phenomenon.’
Does he get a little jealous when there’s another superhero movie, another Spider Man or another Bat Man? He pauses: ‘Honestly the whole thing is just showing the beginning signs of fraying around the edges. It’s a little bit old. Last summer there were five or seven different ones out. I feel that they are critiqued by a different metric to any other movie.’
Surely that metric is box office? ‘Right. But also they are more forgiven because they operate on a different frequency. It’s like a bunch of really good dancers and you’re looking for the one who keeps changing her leg warmers. They make a lot of money.’
Iron Man has made him a lot of money. ‘Yes, I’ve done very well.’ It’s such a lot of money, is it real to him? ‘It’s funny how quickly you can get used to radical changes. Also if you’re raised with a poverty mentality nothing is going to change it. I do know some really stingy billionaires. I come from such a generation of hand to mouthers.’
Is it hard to adjust? ‘Right. But the nice thing is if you have ten pints of ice cream in the freezer and it’s night-time you go I’m not really feeling it for ice cream. If you don’t have any you’re craving ice cream. If you’ve got plenty of ice cream you’re not going to eat it and think there’s never going to be any more. There’s not the kind of famine psyche, you know. There’s a whole generation of kids who have had to stomach this privilege and try to individuate in spite of it.’
Does he worry that having too much money could have a bad effect on his children? Does he go along with Sting who said recently he wouldn’t be leaving any of his money to his children? ‘Anything Sting says I agree with,’ he says grinning.
It turns out that Downey is a huge Sting fan. Trudie Styler produced the movie A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints (2006) in which he starred. ‘Sting is so authentically himself even though he’s always changing. He might say now I’m in my medieval phase. I’m only playing medieval instruments. I’ll let you know when I’m done.’
I don’t get the impression Downey is particularly materially driven. I think he always has wanted to do the best possible job. ‘I want to make a movie that’s commercial and the studio will not lose money but I want to do something that feels like a departure.’
He says that he’s talking about a Sherlock Holmes III and how he hopes to return to London. He does a very funny Guy Ritchie impersonation. And he speaks of Jude Law with great love.
‘There isn’t anybody I’d rather be figuring out fight choreographies or how to sell a moment with. He is like my acting wife. Totally trustworthy, technically and intellectually sound.’
How about his actual wife? What is team Downey really like? ‘She’s a really good den mother and I really like being under her wing when we’re working. I bring in other people that are a little bit complicated and she sorts them out. She always knows the really cool venue or what people to bring together, who will get on with whom. No one feels like they’re not invited. It’s so emotionally healthy. I have never met anyone who can be so cut and dried about things yet is able to say things in a way where people’s feelings don’t get hurt.’
He says he is looking forward to taking things at a slower pace –
fewer projects, more family time, especially with his new baby daughter about to arrive. He is about to leave for a short promotional junket.
‘I guess I’m self driving,’ says Downey. Does that worry him, that a driver isn’t on hand? ‘Not at all. I’ve got a little convertible number, a promotional vehicle from Audi and I love it. As long as they want me to drive them I’m going to be seen driving them.’
Is there anything that he loves to spend money on and anything he hates? ‘I love spending money on gifts. I hate spending money on a septic system in my house. They run the pipes away from the house and then the house stinks more than it ever did after you spent all this money on it. I hate throwing good money after bad.’
I have been drinking bottles of raw tea which I’ve never seen before. Downey loads me up with several more bottles to takeaway. He is just a generous guy.

He’s wiry . A body hard from work out. The eyes swivel and dart, they don’t want to miss anything. He talks fast, sometimes at tangents, but he talks as if whatever he has to say has to be expelled from him, an urgency and a passion.

He is carrying a tiny black suitcase. He flips it open to reveal Chinese herbs and other such pills. He is still pacing and talking as he paces. I wonder if it’s a ritual. Then he opens his mini-suitcase. Telling me he’s got nothing to hide. He wants me to see all his pills. He is dedicated to being as healthy as possible

Now one of the most sought after and richest actors on the planet, reputedly earning £31 million from his last movie The Avengers alone. He is the star of the money minting franchise Iron Man and also the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes franchise which has grossed more than $1 billion. It’s interesting to consider just how spectacular his success has been when many predicted he would not survive, not just in the industry but be alive at all.

We are here to talk about Iron Man 3 where he reprises his role as the eccentric but brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man. It is perhaps the most psychologically complex in the trilogy so far as Stark feels he must answer the question does the man make the suit or the suit make the man?

A similar line of questioning Downey must have asked himself. From 1996 to 2001 he was arrested various times on drug related charges. Rehab didn’t work. He trespassed when on parole. He had to do time in jail.

During that time though he never delivered less than 100 per cent on set and always turned up on time, even getting a Golden Globe in 2000 for his stint on Ally McBeal.
Iron Man 3 director and writer of Lethal Weapon, Shane Black, said that, ‘Tony Stark/Iron Man is the story of a true American hero. Robert Downey is the American hero. Someone who is passionate, sometimes misguided, sometimes pompous, a genius and a one time drunk.’ He says it with an affectionate smile and adds, ‘People don’t just come out of jail and become possibly the biggest actor in the world.’

Downey’s trajectory is one of Hollywood’s most fascinating and traumatic tales. He was always a great actor. How did he miss that Oscar for Chaplin? He swapped the red carpet, the fancy hotel suites, for a jail cell. Took it with grace; took it like he knew he deserved it; he chose to feel grateful not sorry for himself. Following his stint in jail, he was uninsurable. His friend Mel Gibson paid his insurance for The Singing Detective, after which he met Shane Black for the first time who directed him in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

He had to audition for the first Iron Man, gruelling but he did it. He survived without moral censure to become loveable again where so many others couldn’t and haven’t.

What is it about Downey? His charm, his cleverness, his ability to make anyone laugh. All of that of course. But essentially he’s utterly loveable. Those big eyes when they look at you with their mix of playful and sad win you over every time. Also he never complains.

He is about to be 48 (April 4) and has perhaps become the man he never thought he’d be; living in a lovely house with a lovely wife called Susan and a cute baby called Exton.

Iron Man/Tony Stark has brought him financial contentment, but he brought to Iron Man edge, vulnerability, an ability to be iron hard and emotionally soft. The vulnerability draws you in, to the character and the man. This is the man who opens his little suitcase and lets me see his little pills, all of his insecurities.

‘I love Tony. I love Iron Man. I love the character, the people I get to work with. Will there be another? I don’t know. Do the audience want more? I am fortunate, I don’t have to overstay my welcome. I don’t say things like I feel this is my brand and I really need to influence the way it goes I don’t. I am married, I have a kid, I have a real life without cameras rolling.

‘How would I feel if someone else played Iron Man? Well, my ego would suffer. It would be smashed. But maybe that would be the best thing for me. I hate seeing people’s egos suffer. I hate it when people have to learn those painful lessons of humility.’

He says this with a permanently raised eyebrow, an ironic wink at himself. His ego of course has suffered, and when his life fell apart, ‘I think I have a good amount of humility in the bank, and as long as I don’t create a need for more humility I’ll be around.’

‘There is something very humbling about playing a character that may be somewhat of an extension of yourself. It’s a meditation in character defect.’

Tony Stark is a know all, a show off, someone who constantly learns hubris hurts. Finally we have sat down. I wonder if he had to circle the table a certain number of times otherwise something terrible would happen? He doesn’t answer that specifically. He doesn’t answer much specifically. But he answers with rawness and heart.

‘Rituals are very important as long as you don’t become dependent on them. We are always growing and developing spiritually and we always have different needs for different devotions and different prayers. I started off with this prayer: Can I please just play baseball? Can I just be on a team and maybe if I get on a team I can hit a home run…

‘My spirituality has more to do with maintenance than achievement now. Maintenance is three times harder than achievement.’

He says he is fine to see other people have a drink at a restaurant, but if a waiter asks him if he would like a glass he says, ‘No thank you. I have plans for Christmas.’
He has referred to himself as a Jewish Buddhist. Intense martial arts workouts have meant the endorphin high has replaced the drug high and his relationship with his wife Susan Levin, who he met when she was a producer on Gothika, has given him emotional calm.

‘Stability, intellectual peer, and monster sex machine. And she runs the show. She has strength and realism and is someone who is unscathed by her first dozen years of experience.’

Their son Exton was born just over a year ago and Downey talks excitedly about him. His secret to a happy marriage? ‘Realising that two people become a third thing. I take on some of her characteristics and she takes on some of mine. It’s like having a full length mirror in front of you all day long.’

Downey seems to relish the idea of checking in on himself. It’s as if he enjoys being hard on himself. Shane Black says that after working together on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ‘we felt like kindred spirits. Robert doesn’t change with a big budget. We still had the same kind of meetings hashing things out, trying to get to the heart of what scenes are about. Yet there’s a little kid inside him.’
Downey says, ‘I love everything he says. For sure there’s a kid inside. I’m not sure what kid. Some kids like a rough and tumble atmosphere. Some need to know they’re very safe. Some are too coddled and some aren’t loved enough.’
You wonder briefly if he ever felt loved enough as a kid. Robert Downey Sr was an avant garde film director. Downey Jr played a puppy in one of his movies Pound.
His mother was an actress comedian and his parents divorced when he was 13. Downey is chewing hard on his Nicorette gum. The last time I interviewed him he smoked at the same time as eating tuna tartare. ‘It’s the best. What’s awful is smoking cigarettes.’

Tony Stark has nightmares. What keeps him awake? ‘Pretty much every night I put my head on the pillow, unless my wife is mad at me, which is not very often, I’ve got a clear conscience. I’m happy. Whenever you have a new opportunity or a new relationship, for me it’s a new baby, these instincts come out. Protective instincts.’

Was he worried about reprising the success of Iron Man? ‘I know when you have this much, I don’t want to call it pressure, let’s call it money on the table from a major corporation that has Mickey Mouse hand towels in their planes, there is a huge expectation. You have to perform at a certain level and you have to hit a lot of marks. By that I don’t mean doing it by numbers, you just have to do it.

‘They trusted me. They trusted me to go to places where he needed to go and sometimes be quiet, and in case you haven’t noticed I like to talk. I’m getting better at not having to hear my own voice as often and I think that’s a positive affirmation for the future.’

Does his success feel like revenge on the people that didn’t want to insure him? ‘No. I know certain people say creative capacity is based on revenge. It’s really not true. I have mellowed although I still have fire in my belly. I’m a firm believer if you are not on your side why should anyone else be, why should a studio be?’

Is it really easy for him to have faith in himself? ‘As I’ve gone on I’ve become much less falsely confident. The missus said to me, “You’re a bright guy and when people say these nice things about you, you quickly agree with them. There is part of you that was raised in a very abstract way and you paid a high price for some of your weaknesses, and there’s a part of you that’s making peace with everything going as well as it has”.

‘As you mature things unravel. You start to address them. For me the process of maturing was very dirty, uncomfortable and embarrassing, but necessary.
‘I have often been my greatest impediment in moving forward and being gainfully employed. This (Iron Man) is not the most important thing but it’s given me an incredible amount of leverage, and I’ve got that leverage without having to sacrifice my enjoyment.’
Halfway through the shooting a stunt went wrong. ‘I did a wire jump. I didn’t want to rehearse it. I don’t know why. We shot so many stunts I thought maybe I’m impervious. I’m 47-years-old, what kind of moron says I don’t’ need a safety harness I’ll just jump. The next thing I know we have to shut down production for six weeks. I really yanked my ankle. It hurt. Everything was a mess.’
Does he feel like a superhero in real life? ‘Absolutely not. I mean I did, but not any more. I did for that five seconds and then I was in hospital.’
Downey loves to bring intensity to a character. Maybe he just does it naturally. Offloads some inner turmoil. Certainly Tony Stark is a more complex superhero for everything Downey’s given him.

‘Am I that intense? Maybe it’s unmanaged anxiety. I think I’m calming down. Maybe that makes me more capable of playing these tense people, very wired and agitated.’
Is he happy at the moment? ‘I am embracing the possibility of happiness. There are certain things I want to say I can’t control. I decided I didn’t need to rehearse a dangerous stunt. I did a jump that busted my ankle and I couldn’t believe that had happened to me, but why not me? In a way it was the best thing that could have happened. It gave me time to think about the movie and time to see what we’d already shot.’
There’s something in Downey’s headset that’s ruthlessly optimistic. How could anyone think a painful twisted ankle was a good thing? But that’s why he has survived so much worse.

‘And now I have a set of understandings about my physical limitations. I had trained hard. I was in fantastic shape. I was convinced that I would not be injured.’
He believed in his own superpower. ‘I know. It’s embarrassing. It was hubris. That’s what it was. Oh God, not hubris again.’
‘Do I think I have an inbuilt destruction mechanism? I don’t know. I don’t know how much I’ll be doing this sort of thing because a I have other interests and b it’s inherently dangerous and c I’m having a very nice run.’
So you want to quit while you’re ahead? ‘Right. I look at people’s careers. I look at the choices they’re making. I look at what the studios are doing. I look at who’s watching them. Then I think oh, they’re twisting this up a little.
‘Me and the missus started a production company and I don’t want it to be one of those companies that develops things into oblivion. We’ve had in a script from a guy who lives in St. Louis who’s a headhunter. He’s turned in the best script that we’ve ever come across. It’s about a lawyer and his judge father. I’ll play the lawyer.’
Robert Duvall is set to play the judge father. So he will be revisiting a father son relationship? ‘Yes. The first image I ever had of a superhero in my lifetime was when I saw my dad in a Superman T-shirt with long arms. The judge needs to be a mountain of a man. My dad and I get along well but there’s a certain amount to be explored there.’
Interesting to say he gets along well. Wasn’t there a time when he was desperate for money and his father wouldn’t give him any? ‘Yes, but he was right. He was trying to prove a point. He tended not to give me a hard time, but that time I think he was right.’ Downey called him broke and homeless and asked for money. His father refused to help. ‘If he hadn’t said go and get a job, get it from friends, I might never have discovered my ability to hustle and that life wasn’t a handout.’

His father also helped him discover a liking for smoking weed? ‘Yesss.’ He puts on a faux embarrassed face. ‘It was all great but the price was so high. It’s a different generation, a different set of understandings.’
‘It’s the same with chocolate cake. If you like chocolate cake and you know a really good bakery you have to ask yourself if you are willing to pay the price of getting jacked up on sugar. I don’t want my cheeks to be all puffy if I am shooting a movie or a cover so I’m not going to eat that chocolate. If you’ve ever lost the ability to make that decision, you realise that when you get that ability back it’s the most precious and glorious thing you can posses.
‘There have been some times recently where I’ve been eating ice cream. I discovered a great ice cream company. They have cookie dough and mint chocolate chip. I’ve gone in phases where I’ve banished them from the freezer and then they find their way in and I’m secretly delighted. I’ll do several nights in a sustained carpet bombing of my colon. I’ll do it for a couple of nights and then I’ll leave it. It amazes me if you have a dependency for something if you get away from it for long enough you can return to it. But I would never do this with drink or drugs. Ice cream and cake. Nobody should fully give up. Just pick a couple of days a month where you can get down and dirty with it. You still pay a price.’
He delves in his little suitcase. Each of the Chinese formulas are designed to do something different. There’s also sunglasses and wet wipes and more Nicorette gum. ‘The supplements are if I’m feeling low in energy. I have an acupuncturist and many secret weapons. I train with martial arts. I am brown belt. I don’t do it every day. Some days I stay at home so I can see the boy.’
The boy Exton is an Aquarian. ‘I had an Aquarian girlfriend once. I’m not sure how that translates to baby boys. We are not in touch any more. She got mad at me for something that was probably my fault. She felt very strongly about it. Even if you have evidence to the contrary, if someone feels very strongly about something it’s always best to assume they are right.’
Before the current Mrs Downey he was married to actress Deborah Falconer after a six-week whirlwind romance. They were married in 1992. They had a son, Indio, now 19. The marriage broke down after Downey’s repeated trips to rehab and jail and ended in 2001. The divorce was finalised in 2004.
Before that he had an eight-year relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker. He told me once that he never left anyone. ‘I’ve only ever been left. They made that decision. They were never abandoned. Abandonment is something I’ve experienced.’
I don’t think he likes to dwell on the past. He’s very much in the present. He likes to brim with enthusiasm not weighed down by regret. He is not abandoned now by any means. He seems nurtured.
‘The missus and I work incredibly hard to stay current with each other, to be kind to each other, to ignite each other when we can because if you’ve gone out and done your day and she’s done her day and you come home exhausted you need to try harder. You don’t want to be just co-existing. I don’t want to be too tired for her.’
The promotion tour for Iron Man 3 is a juggernaut involving Beijing, Seoul, Paris. ‘We have a two week rule. We are never apart for more than two weeks. We have another Sherlock coming up, or at least we’re going to write a script and see how it turns out.

‘We’ve got very strong relationships in Britain. I love London. When we did the first Sherlock we learnt a lot about British people which is if you’re doing something difficult don’t just grind the monkey till the wheels come off, be civilised. Offer everyone cheese. Always chat for a little while.
‘The last time we were in London with Sherlock the missus was pregnant and that’s when we got very British. She said, “I can’t be on set with you unless you are behaving like a gentleman the whole time”. And since then we have sought to bring the same sort of energy and civility to whatever we do.’
Does he prefer to love or be loved? ‘I prefer to love although I’m getting better at the other. I’ve allowed myself to be loved up for a good five years.’ You can’t help wishing him that for many years to come. Robert Downey Jr strides into the Santa Monica beach front hotel room, hugs me hello and starts to pace around the table. He is wearing a cream lose knit sweater with a thin T-shirt underneath, soft grey elephant chords, neatly manicured facial hair. His eyes round puppy dog saucer eyes.

He’s wiry . The eyes swivel and dart, they don’t want to miss anything. He talks fast, sometimes at tangents, but he talks as if whatever he has to say has to be expelled from him, an urgency and a passion.
He is carrying a tiny black suitcase. He flips it open to reveal Chinese herbs and other such pills. He is still pacing and talking as he paces. I wonder if it’s a ritual. Then he opens his mini-suitcase. Telling me he’s got nothing to hide. He wants me to see all his pills. He is dedicated to being as healthy as possible

Now one of the most sought after and richest actors on the planet, reputedly earning £31 million from his last movie The Avengers alone. He is the star of the money minting franchise Iron Man and also the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes franchise which has grossed more than $1 billion. It’s interesting to consider just how spectacular his success has been when many predicted he would not survive, not just in the industry but be alive at all.

We are here to talk about Iron Man 3 where he reprises his role as the eccentric but brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man. It is perhaps the most psychologically complex in the trilogy so far as Stark feels he must answer the question does the man make the suit or the suit make the man?
A similar line of questioning Downey must have asked himself. From 1996 to 2001 he was arrested various times on drug related charges. Rehab didn’t work. He trespassed when on parole. He had to do time in jail.
During that time though he never delivered less than 100 per cent on set and always turned up on time, even getting a Golden Globe in 2000 for his stint on Ally McBeal.

Iron Man 3 director and writer of Lethal Weapon, Shane Black, said that, ‘Tony Stark/Iron Man is the story of a true American hero. Robert Downey is the American hero. Someone who is passionate, sometimes misguided, sometimes pompous, a genius and a one time drunk.’ He says it with an affectionate smile and adds, ‘People don’t just come out of jail and become possibly the biggest actor in the world.’

Downey’s trajectory is one of Hollywood’s most fascinating and traumatic tales. He was always a great actor. How did he miss that Oscar for Chaplin? He swapped the red carpet, the fancy hotel suites, for a jail cell. Took it with grace; took it like he knew he deserved it; he chose to feel grateful not sorry for himself. Following his stint in jail, he was uninsurable. His friend Mel Gibson paid his insurance for The Singing Detective, after which he met Shane Black for the first time who directed him in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

He had to audition for the first Iron Man, gruelling but he did it. He survived without moral censure to become loveable again where so many others couldn’t and haven’t.
What is it about Downey? His charm, his cleverness, his ability to make anyone laugh. All of that of course. But essentially he’s utterly loveable. Those big eyes when they look at you with their mix of playful and sad win you over every time. Also he never complains.
He is about to be 48 (April 4) and has perhaps become the man he never thought he’d be; living in a lovely house with a lovely wife called Susan and a cute baby called Exton.
Iron Man/Tony Stark has brought him financial contentment, but he brought to Iron Man edge, vulnerability, an ability to be iron hard and emotionally soft. The vulnerability draws you in, to the character and the man. This is the man who opens his little suitcase and lets me see his little pills, all of his insecurities.
‘I love Tony. I love Iron Man. I love the character, the people I get to work with. Will there be another? I don’t know. Do the audience want more? I am fortunate, I don’t have to overstay my welcome. I don’t say things like I feel this is my brand and I really need to influence the way it goes I don’t. I am married, I have a kid, I have a real life without cameras rolling.
‘How would I feel if someone else played Iron Man? Well, my ego would suffer. It would be smashed. But maybe that would be the best thing for me. I hate seeing people’s egos suffer. I hate it when people have to learn those painful lessons of humility.’
He says this with a permanently raised eyebrow, an ironic wink at himself. His ego of course has suffered, and when his life fell apart, ‘I think I have a good amount of humility in the bank, and as long as I don’t create a need for more humility I’ll be around.’
‘There is something very humbling about playing a character that may be somewhat of an extension of yourself. It’s a meditation in character defect.’
Tony Stark is a know all, a show off, someone who constantly learns hubris hurts. Finally we have sat down. I wonder if he had to circle the table a certain number of times otherwise something terrible would happen? He doesn’t answer that specifically. He doesn’t answer much specifically. But he answers with rawness and heart.
‘Rituals are very important as long as you don’t become dependent on them. We are always growing and developing spiritually and we always have different needs for different devotions and different prayers. I started off with this prayer: Can I please just play baseball? Can I just be on a team and maybe if I get on a team I can hit a home run…
‘My spirituality has more to do with maintenance than achievement now. Maintenance is three times harder than achievement.’
He says he is fine to see other people have a drink at a restaurant, but if a waiter asks him if he would like a glass he says, ‘No thank you. I have plans for Christmas.’
He has referred to himself as a Jewish Buddhist. Intense martial arts workouts have meant the endorphin high has replaced the drug high and his relationship with his wife Susan Levin, who he met when she was a producer on Gothika, has given him emotional calm.
‘Stability, intellectual peer, and monster sex machine. And she runs the show. She has strength and realism and is someone who is unscathed by her first dozen years of experience.’
Their son Exton was born just over a year ago and Downey talks excitedly about him. His secret to a happy marriage? ‘Realising that two people become a third thing. I take on some of her characteristics and she takes on some of mine. It’s like having a full length mirror in front of you all day long.’
Downey seems to relish the idea of checking in on himself. It’s as if he enjoys being hard on himself. Shane Black says that after working together on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ‘we felt like kindred spirits. Robert doesn’t change with a big budget. We still had the same kind of meetings hashing things out, trying to get to the heart of what scenes are about. Yet there’s a little kid inside him.’

Downey says, ‘I love everything he says. For sure there’s a kid inside. I’m not sure what kid. Some kids like a rough and tumble atmosphere. Some need to know they’re very safe. Some are too coddled and some aren’t loved enough.’
You wonder briefly if he ever felt loved enough as a kid. Robert Downey Sr was an avant garde film director. Downey Jr played a puppy in one of his movies Pound.
His mother was an actress comedian and his parents divorced when he was 13. Downey is chewing hard on his Nicorette gum. The last time I interviewed him he smoked at the same time as eating tuna tartare. ‘It’s the best. What’s awful is smoking cigarettes.’
Tony Stark has nightmares. What keeps him awake? ‘Pretty much every night I put my head on the pillow, unless my wife is mad at me, which is not very often, I’ve got a clear conscience. I’m happy. Whenever you have a new opportunity or a new relationship, for me it’s a new baby, these instincts come out. Protective instincts.’
Was he worried about reprising the success of Iron Man? ‘I know when you have this much, I don’t want to call it pressure, let’s call it money on the table from a major corporation that has Mickey Mouse hand towels in their planes, there is a huge expectation. You have to perform at a certain level and you have to hit a lot of marks. By that I don’t mean doing it by numbers, you just have to do it.

‘They trusted me. They trusted me to go to places where he needed to go and sometimes be quiet, and in case you haven’t noticed I like to talk. I’m getting better at not having to hear my own voice as often and I think that’s a positive affirmation for the future.’
Does his success feel like revenge on the people that didn’t want to insure him? ‘No. I know certain people say creative capacity is based on revenge. It’s really not true. I have mellowed although I still have fire in my belly. I’m a firm believer if you are not on your side why should anyone else be, why should a studio be?’

Is it really easy for him to have faith in himself? ‘As I’ve gone on I’ve become much less falsely confident. The missus said to me, “You’re a bright guy and when people say these nice things about you, you quickly agree with them. There is part of you that was raised in a very abstract way and you paid a high price for some of your weaknesses, and there’s a part of you that’s making peace with everything going as well as it has”.
‘As you mature things unravel. You start to address them. For me the process of maturing was very dirty, uncomfortable and embarrassing, but necessary.
‘I have often been my greatest impediment in moving forward and being gainfully employed. This (Iron Man) is not the most important thing but it’s given me an incredible amount of leverage, and I’ve got that leverage without having to sacrifice my enjoyment.’
Halfway through the shooting a stunt went wrong. ‘I did a wire jump. I didn’t want to rehearse it. I don’t know why. We shot so many stunts I thought maybe I’m impervious. I’m 47-years-old, what kind of moron says I don’t’ need a safety harness I’ll just jump. The next thing I know we have to shut down production for six weeks. I really yanked my ankle. It hurt. Everything was a mess.’
Does he feel like a superhero in real life? ‘Absolutely not. I mean I did, but not any more. I did for that five seconds and then I was in hospital.’
Downey loves to bring intensity to a character. Maybe he just does it naturally. Offloads some inner turmoil. Certainly Tony Stark is a more complex superhero for everything Downey’s given him.
‘Am I that intense? Maybe it’s unmanaged anxiety. I think I’m calming down. Maybe that makes me more capable of playing these tense people, very wired and agitated.’
Is he happy at the moment? ‘I am embracing the possibility of happiness. There are certain things I want to say I can’t control. I decided I didn’t need to rehearse a dangerous stunt. I did a jump that busted my ankle and I couldn’t believe that had happened to me, but why not me? In a way it was the best thing that could have happened. It gave me time to think about the movie and time to see what we’d already shot.’
There’s something in Downey’s headset that’s ruthlessly optimistic. How could anyone think a painful twisted ankle was a good thing? But that’s why he has survived so much worse.
‘And now I have a set of understandings about my physical limitations. I had trained hard. I was in fantastic shape. I was convinced that I would not be injured.’
He believed in his own superpower. ‘I know. It’s embarrassing. It was hubris. That’s what it was. Oh God, not hubris again.’

‘Do I think I have an inbuilt destruction mechanism? I don’t know. I don’t know how much I’ll be doing this sort of thing because a I have other interests and b it’s inherently dangerous and c I’m having a very nice run.’
So you want to quit while you’re ahead? ‘Right. I look at people’s careers. I look at the choices they’re making. I look at what the studios are doing. I look at who’s watching them. Then I think oh, they’re twisting this up a little.
‘Me and the missus started a production company and I don’t want it to be one of those companies that develops things into oblivion. We’ve had in a script from a guy who lives in St. Louis who’s a headhunter. He’s turned in the best script that we’ve ever come across. It’s about a lawyer and his judge father. I’ll play the lawyer.’

Robert Duvall is set to play the judge father. So he will be revisiting a father son relationship? ‘Yes. The first image I ever had of a superhero in my lifetime was when I saw my dad in a Superman T-shirt with long arms. The judge needs to be a mountain of a man. My dad and I get along well but there’s a certain amount to be explored there.’

Interesting to say he gets along well. Wasn’t there a time when he was desperate for money and his father wouldn’t give him any? ‘Yes, but he was right. He was trying to prove a point. He tended not to give me a hard time, but that time I think he was right.’ Downey called him broke and homeless and asked for money. His father refused to help. ‘If he hadn’t said go and get a job, get it from friends, I might never have discovered my ability to hustle and that life wasn’t a handout.’
His father also helped him discover a liking for smoking weed? ‘Yesss.’ He puts on a faux embarrassed face. ‘It was all great but the price was so high. It’s a different generation, a different set of understandings.’

‘It’s the same with chocolate cake. If you like chocolate cake and you know a really good bakery you have to ask yourself if you are willing to pay the price of getting jacked up on sugar. I don’t want my cheeks to be all puffy if I am shooting a movie or a cover so I’m not going to eat that chocolate. If you’ve ever lost the ability to make that decision, you realise that when you get that ability back it’s the most precious and glorious thing you can posses.

‘There have been some times recently where I’ve been eating ice cream. I discovered a great ice cream company. They have cookie dough and mint chocolate chip. I’ve gone in phases where I’ve banished them from the freezer and then they find their way in and I’m secretly delighted. I’ll do several nights in a sustained carpet bombing of my colon. I’ll do it for a couple of nights and then I’ll leave it. It amazes me if you have a dependency for something if you get away from it for long enough you can return to it. But I would never do this with drink or drugs. Ice cream and cake. Nobody should fully give up. Just pick a couple of days a month where you can get down and dirty with it. You still pay a price.’
He delves in his little suitcase. Each of the Chinese formulas are designed to do something different. There’s also sunglasses and wet wipes and more Nicorette gum. ‘The supplements are if I’m feeling low in energy. I have an acupuncturist and many secret weapons. I train with martial arts. I am brown belt. I don’t do it every day. Some days I stay at home so I can see the boy.’
The boy Exton is an Aquarian. ‘I had an Aquarian girlfriend once. I’m not sure how that translates to baby boys. We are not in touch any more. She got mad at me for something that was probably my fault. She felt very strongly about it. Even if you have evidence to the contrary, if someone feels very strongly about something it’s always best to assume they are right.’
Before the current Mrs Downey he was married to actress Deborah Falconer after a six-week whirlwind romance. They were married in 1992. They had a son, Indio, now 19. The marriage broke down after Downey’s repeated trips to rehab and jail and ended in 2001. The divorce was finalised in 2004.
Before that he had an eight-year relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker. He told me once that he never left anyone. ‘I’ve only ever been left. They made that decision. They were never abandoned. Abandonment is something I’ve experienced.’
I don’t think he likes to dwell on the past. He’s very much in the present. He likes to brim with enthusiasm not weighed down by regret. He is not abandoned now by any means. He seems nurtured.

‘The missus and I work incredibly hard to stay current with each other, to be kind to each other, to ignite each other when we can because if you’ve gone out and done your day and she’s done her day and you come home exhausted you need to try harder. You don’t want to be just co-existing. I don’t want to be too tired for her.’

The promotion tour for Iron Man 3 is a juggernaut involving Beijing, Seoul, Paris. ‘We have a two week rule. We are never apart for more than two weeks. We have another Sherlock coming up, or at least we’re going to write a script and see how it turns out.

‘We’ve got very strong relationships in Britain. I love London. When we did the first Sherlock we learnt a lot about British people which is if you’re doing something difficult don’t just grind the monkey till the wheels come off, be civilised. Offer everyone cheese. Always chat for a little while.
‘The last time we were in London with Sherlock the missus was pregnant and that’s when we got very British. She said, “I can’t be on set with you unless you are behaving like a gentleman the whole time”. And since then we have sought to bring the same sort of energy and civility to whatever we do.’
Does he prefer to love or be loved? ‘I prefer to love although I’m getting better at the other. I’ve allowed myself to be loved up for a good five years.’ You can’t help wishing him that for many years to come.

Robert Downey Jr

The word that is most used to describe Robert Downey Jr is loveable, albeit, a loveable tornado. That is what it can be like to be with him. Exhausting, emotionally rearranging, destructive, and thrilling, and he pulls you in. From his debut as a cocaine addict in Less Than Zero to his Oscar nominated Chaplin, he totally inhabited these characters. He found a way to bring them into himself and put that part of himself right out there to touch you. He always made you feel that you could own a part of him, take him home and nurture him, possibly illustrated in his best performance ever – his own life. In and out of jail and rehab, time and time again he would try, fail. It wasn’t just the normal Hollywood combo – great talent and self destruction walk hand in hand down Sunset Boulevard – because it was more human than that, and more outrageous. However, it was only ever his self he let down. Already on probation for speeding, possessing drugs and a gun, we can all both laugh and cry with him for the goldilocks incident, where he had fallen way off the wagon and staggered into the wrong house, believing it to be his own and collapsed comatose in the bed of his neighbour’s 11 year old son. He seemed at the same time helpless and not a victim, even though in court he came across an avenging Puritan judge Mira, who, time and time again, wanted to set an example by not lifting the punishment, making no excuses. During his time in jail and in rehab, there was a constant internet vigil. Websites called “To Know Him Is To Love Him” where Downey Jr was drawn as a Botticelli cherub and lavished with love poetry by fans across the world who boasted a 12 month international prayer chain. Another reason people find Downey so loveable is that he was on the edge and he almost fell over. He is the pole by which people measure themselves, grateful they could never feel things so sorely and fall apart so proficiently, but magnetized watching him put himself together again. How we all loved him raise the game of Ally McBeal, win his Golden Globe, only to be dashed again in a Palm Springs Hotel room, where allegedly, his own dealer tipped off the police. He’d been doing drugs and there was the threat of incarceration again. When we meet in the plush L’Ermitage Hotel, home of the $45 salad and a constant rushing fountain and James Woods and a puppy in the foyer, it seems a different universe. But of course, it isn’t that far apart, or even that different. Downey is all wiry limbs, agitated animation, both elegant and ungainly, raw and marinated. His body is toned and there’s no cheruby cheeks. His skin looks like it’s felt too much for one lifetime. Not that that makes him unsexy. In fact, quite the contrary. There’s a huge sexual energy about him. You could see it shining out of him even as he played Dennis Potter’s psoriasis suffering Singing Detective.

His arms were pocked like a pizza, his skin a mass of painful flakes and sores, and even as his own nightmare fears and paranoias enveloped him, you were with him. You wanted him to be saved. Dennis Potter wrote the feature length Singing Detective just before he died, as he was unhappy with the way Hollywood reworked his Pennies From Heaven into a movie. Downey is aware of carrying the heavy mantle, delivering Potter’s last and perhaps most poignant words to the world. He didn’t have a problem seeing himself as the depressed, drugged, immobilized in hospital Daniel Dark, but when the scenes intermingle with childhood memories, and he is the cool Singing Detective himself, he felt momentarily floored “Because I am not cool. I am not Bruce Willis. I am not Mel Gibson. I can’t be the guy who looks good with a gun.” No, much easier for him to be the guy that can seem to shimmer out of a thousand sores. The script was delivered to him by Gibson while he was in rehab, along with the videos of the television series which he and the other rehabees watched greedily. “Gibson said ‘Maybe it’s something we can do together’ and got in his helicopter and left. Once I wanted to do it, he said “You’re going to do the first five and a half weeks by yourself and I’m going to come in for the last three days.” Their scenes together are very intense and nurturing. “Basically, that’s how he is. He’s like a brother to me.” Gibson put up his own money for Downey’s insurance costs, which were astronomically high due to his record of instability. “I hope I’m in a position one day to be fostering that same kind of exchange and support with someone a couple of years my junior and giving something to them that I could probably have done myself. He was serious too. In some of those scenes, where he was like, ‘Do you plan to get better?’, that wasn’t just the characters. It was he and I.” And do you plan to get better? “Yeah. I was already on the way. But I don’t know if I planned it or not. What is the movie about? In essence, it’s about someone who’s traumatized by everything they needed to witness and an inability to move past your initial female attachment.” We’ve been together for about ten minutes when he looks at me right in the eyes and says “I didn’t get the movie until last week. I didn’t get it.” For him, the aftermath of a movie, like when he became embroiled with all the coincidences and similarities between him and Chaplin and he got to know Chaplin’s daughters long after the movie had wrapped, is as an important part of the process as the acting. In The Singing Detective, his wife, played by Robin Wright Penn, might be cheating on him and might have stolen his script. Or, she might be standing by him. “She’s there because she’s a principle of feminine healing energy that’s not judgmental and shows up and tries to quell that masculine boring fucking paranoid energy. What I mean is, she’s good girl and why would good girls hang around miserable assholes? No good girl would ever stay with guys like us. Any good girl would kick you to the curb. And because of that, you believe you will never attract a really good woman.” And maybe when you do, you think they’re evil? “Yes. Thank you. And that’s what happens. In the movie he’s already halfway home because she’s been showing up for him.”

And is that what happened to you? “Yes. Finally, I get it.” Downey’s love life has of course been as passionate and as volatile as it gets. He was with Sarah Jessica Parker for 7 years. It was a constant battle between her and his addictions. Most of the time, she won, but said although he was always emotionally available, he couldn’t be faithful. But it’s because of that emotionally available thing that you can’t dismiss him for it. Or at least you could if you were Deborah Falconer, the model he married after 6 weeks, with whom he’s now separated and with whom he has a son, Indio, now ten. His new girlfriend is a producer, Susan Levin. He met her on the set of Gothica. She works for Joel Silver and keeps him on a choke chain, but he says “I love it.” He seems deliriously in love with Susan. He has a separate cell phone which only she can call and a polaroid style picture of them together stuck on it. They call constantly. “Since I’ve met this girl, it’s been really weird because there’s been closure with my ex and separation from my mother.” It’s as if his investigation of female energy in the Singing Detective has brought him closure in his own life. His mother is someone who seems to have been both brilliant and unnurturing. Do you believe in that Freudian thing that all men marry their mother? “I thought if I changed the outside, I wouldn’t keep stamping repeat every cell again and again, so instead of short, Scottish, brown eyed stocky, I’ll go for tall, midatlantic, blue eyed down for the cause Amazon.” And, was it all the same thing? “Right. But now, as you can see, I’m dating a very attractive Jewish woman and I’m so glad I’ve found her. It would be hilarious to be right, but could Joel Silver be cupid?” In Gothica, he plays a doctor who is incredibly sweet. “It’s a smart movie, today’s version of The Shining in an institution, and I try to rehabilitate poor misguided and often violent sinister women.” Do you like misguided women or do you prefer grounded ones? “I’ve done my tour of duty… No. I am going for stability, intellectual peer and monster sex machine. And she runs the show. She has strength and realism and she is someone who is unscathed by her first dozen years of experience.” Are you choosing that to compliment your childhood which was very scathed? “Well it was, but I’m not a bitterball about it because we can all choose our experiences on some level. There are no victims. And if I hear one more person talk about how they are destroyed because they never got their dad’s approval… Oooh. That’s just self centred to the extreme.” Downey is very agitated because although they brought us our food – spicy tuna fish in coconut juice – he has not been brought his cigarettes. He’s only distracted from his agitation when I tell him that I had met Dennis Potter who showed up for the interview wearing polythene bags around his feet so he wouldn’t shed. Only now, he’s insatiably interested in Dennis. “At the time, I was just pretty busy trying not to go nuts. One day we’d have full body makeup and the next I’d put on this suit and have to look cool and confident, so it really took me out of my head, especially doing the singing stuff. The choreographers were like ‘You did Chaplin, you can move around,’ and I was like ‘Nooo.'” So, were you miserable? “Well I’m not right now, but that miserable guy is in there,” he says, looking like he’s going to burst out of his own skin for his need of a cigarette. “I’m tired of the faux depression thing. It’s just an excuse to take your favourite medications. What’s depressing about life, really?” he says, sending himself up. He seems to want to downplay his anxiety, his pain. The cigarettes arrive on a silver tray. When do you get miserable then? “Either not getting what you want or thinking you’re going to lose something you have. And if we got what we wanted, we probably wouldn’t want it by the time we were done eating. If ifs were gifts, every day would be Christmas, right?” Well Christmas, that is usually depressing for most people. “No. I’m ass backward. I’m going to have a great Christmas. I’m thinking of taking my gal and we might roll over to Hawaii, crash at Woody Harrelson’s estate, get butt naked.” He’s impressed with himself that he has plans for Christmas and he even has plans for Hallowe’en. “I’m going to call up one of my friends who lives in Malibu Colony so Indio can be on a little strip to trick and treat.

Do you think I should go as Dennis?” I think that might be a bit scary. “The last time I did Hallowe’en, I wasn’t entirely in remission and I picked out a costume, an off the shelf costume, and it was called Creepy Skelabones, and some people prefer to call me that to this day as a painful reminder of what is possible. Skelabones 2000.” He seems constantly hard on himself, relentlessly attacking his former self, and I wonder, does that mean he’s going to fall off the edge. “I’m not presently struggling with the idea of imagining that it would be fun or would serve any purpose to remind me that it’s it’s own world now. It’s an iron curtain country for me. It’s the past. It’s hard enough to be conscious and trust the universe. I don’t want to put myself in that lab rat condition where I’m an experiment. You know, it’s like Renee Zellweger said in that Jerry Maguire film, I choose us, meaning the family and all of that. “Do I really want to say, “I choose psychosis? I mean, there’s something to be said for it, because it’s interesting and that’s the rub. People want me to be interesting. It feels like it’s been ingrained in me, but why would I have to act out? It’s about interrupting that pattern, isn’t it?” Do you know where your pattern came from in the first place, I ask, feeling like I’ve asked a very loaded question. “Uh huh. I think there’s an inherent drive to alter consciousness and also, want to get some kind of spiritual connection. And one is socially groomed to smoke a blunt thing. Man takes drink, drink takes man. At a certain point, you are not longer of the constitution to call the shots. Can you imagine what it’s like, every day you got up, you go on a flight and the flight was hijacked. You have two chances. We’re going to let them turn us around and run us in there, or we’re going to nail them and lose us all in the Allegheny Mountains. It doesn’t matter. There’s no positive outcome regardless of what you do. It’s groundhog day in hell and there’s something really glamorous and very attractive being that very warped fucked up, oh he’s such a sweetie. Yeah, right” he says, turning a venomous tongue against himself. He clearly feels he’s played that Hollywood loves a comeback role and embraced it for all it’s worth only to lose faith in that role because he’s not really playing it for himself. He’s bored and tantalized and annoyed with that character.

That character was a little too victimy for his liking. Do you think people identified with you and felt good because they only went to the edge and you fell off so it validates their bad behaviour or addiction? “I feel like that when I see other people go off the rails. I feel I have been obligated to perform in society. You know, there I was, still drunk, but now a drooling guru status. Please. No victims,” he says, intermittently flashing me burning eyes. Bringing us back to where the pattern might have started, it is just possible it could have been with his father, Robert Downey Sr, with whom he first shared a joint when he was eight. They continued to use joints as emotional bonding after his parents were divorced when he was 13. The drugs were the connection. Downey Sr was a film and stage director who had his son once play a dog in something called Pound, bragging at the time that it was cheaper than getting a babysitter. It has been reported that his father liked to see him do drugs because he thought it was cute. Agitatedly, Downey Jr says, “That’s a misrepresentation, and a word I want to strike from the dictionary. Cute.” He says the word with contempt. “My dad was nothing along the lines of Cassavetes and Altman. Compared to those guys, back in the day, he was actually pretty conservative. He was a handsome Irish Jew and my mother was a comedian. They got caught up in it more by osmosis, but I think there must have been a genetic predisposition to drugs.” He puts his eyes heavenward in mock deification of the demon drugs and says theatrically. “‘Oh, at last, my long last love’ and we were all fucked.” Downey comes in and out of anger and calm, the theatrical relish of words and quiet analysis. “But I have to say this about the over the edge. Over the edge was not me. Over the edge was people that I have buried, people who can no longer see their kids, other people who are fighting cases now and they’re not 38, they’re 45, 59, 62. Addiction is incarnate. It can’t be stopped unless by an outside force.” Is that you, eating and smoking at the same time, I say, as he waves his cigarette above his tuna. He seems to have misplaced the matches. “Oh, no, no. Not quite. But I’m about to be smoking.” One gets the impression that the edge, whatever that might be, is a moveable line and Downey does have to be constantly aware of it and swivel and shift . He has to keep himself ultra in check.

“Yes, because every day you have to reimprint yourself. Every cell is like a comic book stamp, and for me, I couldn’t have done it without the support of very good friends. And while I participate in that ‘one day at a time, powerless now and forever’, that kind of a programme is a huge mallet that just hits the largest amount of lemmings that need to be kept off that edge. It’s not an exact science. That’s why at a certain points, it didn’t work for me. I promptly got arrested, or as some might say, rescued. But the funny thing is, the same kind of discipline and humility that you need to get over any personal power issue is the same kind of thing that you need not to have a bad reputation on the Fox lot. And that is what you use in getting over this.” It’s been a double edged sword that Downey has always delighted the directors that he’s worked with (Robert Altman in Short Cuts, Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers and James Toback in Two Girls and a Guy), won them accolades, and however unravelled he might have been, he always turned up. It might have been a tool in his recovery that he knew how to do that perfectionism, that he knew how to always get the job done. But the fact that he could get the job done and sometimes done brilliantly when he was using drugs worked against him because it didn’t give him the impetus to stop. His life has always been full of mesmerizing contradictions. The director Mike Figgis said of him that the openness that is necessary to be a good actor can be lethal in real life. In Figgis’s One Night Stand, he was the lynch pin to the movie, a theatre director dying of AIDS. He did it on one of his just released from jail spells and found it easy to inhabit that rattled psyche. Despite the fact that all these directors talk about him lovingly, he says, “I always have a personality meltdown and blame it on the director. It happened with this (The Singing Detective) and it happened with Chaplin. I was fortunate to have a very nurturing and wise person at the helm who didn’t take it personally.” He once said he wasn’t afraid of failure but mediocrity. I don’t think he has a love for any kind of middle ground. When he’s not talking in intellectually complex flamboyant metaphors showing us his brilliant mind, he’s lashing out, angry that he could ever have been a victim. He tells me he’d like to use writing as an outlet for all of this, but he’s too afraid of being criticized. He suffers from a high sense of ego and low self esteem all at the same time.

“It’s almost as if there’s a huge Jackson Pollack mural in the back of you and that represents everything up till now, you can go ahead and look at it, and you think that thing is not really representative of me anymore. But I could operate in that place, you know, that egomaniac with an inferiority complex. But I can also not. I can also recreate a different type of painting. “I heard a guy talking the other day and he said, ‘I used to have really no self esteem and I made this incredible journey to low self esteem’. Well, that’s what I did. But you know, if I was Dennis, and I really had something unmanageable, I would have rolled with it, just like he did. The Veuve Cliquot and just enough morphine to stay so you can work, and smoking whatever it was he smoked. By the way, your tobacco sucks. Benson and Hedges, ugh.” He is smoking Camels. It’s Camels and caffeine all the way. One gets the impression that the hardest part of jail for him must have been the nonsmoking aspect. That, and the horrible tear jerking moment he must have read in the tabloids where Indio, who was then about 7, said “Is daddy a bad man?” Was that made up, or was that tabloid exaggeration? “I think it was a bit of both.” I worry that Downey’s new addiction is that he likes to punish himself too much. He talks about Indio a lot, all the places he’s going to take him and the things he’s going to do with him. Every promise bearing the scars of how emotionally traumatizing it was to have their relationship so disrupted. Right now he’s euphoric that he gets to take him to school, that he gets to be a soccer dad. Are you moving towards living together with him? “We’re moving towards something not unlike that. His mum is really stable and that’s great for him, and I show up as much as I can. I had him last night and we made triple decker peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for his lunch with an Asian pear and Gatorade so his electrolytes don’t drop below an acceptable level after gym time. Saturdays are the soccer games, where he is the leading scorer in the universe. He got three out of six goals, but after he got two, he started doing a very non 20th century thing. He was passing the ball to other players. Bend it like Indio,” he says, tangibly brimming with pride mixed with relief and contentment. The jail time must have been harsh, but he tells me, “The worst was when one of the jail staff asked me to read a script about unicorns. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘It’s not your usual unicorn story.'”

Although, we both know the unicorns were not the worst torture and with typical Downey dexterity, the scene can shift. He takes my hand and places it between his eyes so I can feel the scar. “And that didn’t happen in a fight about you’re not the usual unicorn synopsis. Not was it fighting with a bunch of your brothers over a banana. See this, right above my eyebrow to the middle of my forehead to the middle of my nose? It was all split open. Just the jailhouse love tap,” he shrugs. “They were trying to muscle me into giving some sort of payoff for protection, and I said when I’m done reading the Stephen King novel, I’ll come over and we’ll talk shop. But you don’t come with that in jail, because the next thing I knew, it was on. [It being a full on blood splattered brawl] And well, it was cool after that, they didn’t fuck with me.” Because if you had admitted you needed protection, that would have been the end? “Absolutely. In prison things are so established it’s not going to matter what you do. Sometimes, everyone’s playing handball, and it’s perfect harmony. Your intuitions strengthen to an extreme and you know intuitively when something’s not right. When you’ve got 1200 guys in a yard and you can all of a sudden hear a pin drop, it’s time to get out of Dodge. The map never changes. I learned some lessons. “In a weird, way, the melee of experiences were the same as situations in Hollywood or New York or the midwest. The world is that yard. I don’t want to sound too zen about it. The first time I was in there, they brought in this guy, a minister, he came to the cell and started laying me onto the power of Christ. Out of my depths came the most appropriate word: bullshit.” He kind of howls it, even now, pressing his face up to the sky. “He turned tail and walked out. These days, I’d give him a hug and we’d break it open, see what was going on. At a certain point I decided I’m going to show a good face and develop my own philosophy.” In fact, enthusiastically, he says, “Cellies are great. If you’ve got a great celly, it doesn’t get any better than that.” And if you’ve got a bad one, it doesn’t get any worse. “Correct. But I don’t know about the bad celly experiment because the California Corrections Institution is sharp.” You mean, they match make? “Well, yes. In jails, they either have you there for six months or a year. You’re there because you’re about to catch the chain up to where you really are going to do your time, and while you’re in there, you can’t smoke and you can’t do anything. Or you’re waiting to get in your own personal 12 unit nirvana. Either way, it’s the great and possibly final road trip.

So they always used to put me with the guys that had something to hold on to. I learned a hell of a lot, stuff I can apply to my work, my parenting and street situations. I was raised in Manhattan on the street and was a latchkey kid but there are very few things that could occur now that I wouldn’t have some way of applying my jailhouse mentality to.” Do you keep in touch with your cell mates? “I do. The one I stay in touch with most is probably one of the most brilliant, introspective and selfless guys I’ve ever met, currently serving a life sentence.” What for? “Three strikes law. Details would be unimportant.” Three strikes is a Californian thing. Even if your third offence is stealing a pizzas, you get life in prison. “He calls and you press 5 and accept the charges and he is an incredible source of strength because when you’re at a place where you have to accept you’re through with money or doing all day, (it means doing life), you can be incredibly strong.” Did jail make you have a different attitude to money, as in real money? “I was able to hold onto it in the pen as well as I am in the street. (Which is not very well) “But I’m a hustler. I’ve always known how to hustle.” It certainly seems that way. Whereas a checkered record of being in and out of jail would have finished most actors, he came out first time to get one of the highest paid per episode in television on Ally McBeal, and after that he got sent back to rehab and came out to do Singing Detective and Gothica back to back. What did he think about the yards of finger wagging editorials that said Hollywood is so unforgiving? “Hell, that’s not true. I have nine lives, nine lives. I mean, any situation can change in the blink of an eye.

He has a knack of trying to credit people who perhaps really damaged him. “One of the best things my dad ever did for me was a real tough love thing. I was 17, called him from a phone booth and said I didn’t even have a token for the subway or money for lunch. He said, call your friends. I said I had and he said sorry kid, and hung up. I can’t thank him enough because I’ve been self supporting since I was 17.” I suggest that might mean ingrained in him is a kind of desperation about money; to disregard its power. It doesn’t mean anything so I’ll get rid of it and I can get it again. “I’m not sure that financial instability is the problem. It’s fear of financial instability that fucks things up.” Right now, he doesn’t strike me as someone who’s terribly afraid of that. More as a person who is redefining himself and not let any fears define him. A hard task when it’s not what you’re used to, and when the world wants to adore him for his craziness. As he’s already explained, just because you might have a mural at the back of you (the Jackson Pollock) that’s riddled with fears that define you, it doesn’t mean to say you can’t reorganize those fears.

He is fighting them and he is on a constant course of reinvention. The reason he can survive that reinvention is because he’s not only loveable, he is clearly loved. When Elton John chose him to play himself in the video I Want Love, it was a cameo of a demand. He needed love and he seemed to get it because whatever a bad boy he might have been, he is essentially absolutely loveable.

Jacqueline Bisset has arrived early to meet me at Daphne’s restaurant in South Kensington. She is wearing a fitted tracksuit top with the zip pulled down enough to reveal her famous voluptuous cleavage, and the skinniest of skinny jeans that make her legs look like a ballerina’s. Her eyes are an extraordinary sea green. They peer right into you with an uncanny depth.
Her face is lined, sure, but still beautiful at 69. She doesn’t believe in botox or having work down, and as she said in her now infamous rambling speech when she won her Golden Globe for Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing On The Edge in January, ‘You have to forgive everybody. It’s the best beauty treatment.’
‘I don’t think it gets rid of lines. It just fills you up with an eternal light. I have massive lines, but I feel okay about them,’ she says as she instructs me about never looking back, never wasting energy on regret. ‘Also, as one gets older, one doesn’t have enough time to go through all this angst stuff.’
Her thanking everybody she’d ever met in her life speech which went on long after the get off the stage music had started playing was the highlight of this year’s ceremony. She simply didn’t want to leave. She admitted later that the shock after so many nominations, including one as Most Promising Newcomer for The Sweet Ride in 1968, had made her get ‘things a bit twisted up.’
People said at the time she appeared tired and emotional, but talking to her now where she speaks in long paragraphs searching for the perfect word, I think she was just being herself.
She seems to have always courted controversy with her unique blend of beauty and intellect, English propriety and French laissez-faire.
Everyone said she was having an affair with Frank Sinatra in her breakout role in The Detective (1968). She was not. And later that year when Bullitt came out they said the same of Steve McQueen.
When she was the lead in Truffaut’s Day For Night (1973) everyone thought she was French. She is not, although her mother was born in France. She was brought up in Reading but has been in as many French movies as English language ones and was awarded the French Legion d’Honneur in 2010.
In 1977 she starred in The Deep with Nick Nolte. The poster from the movie with her diving with her wet white T-shirt stuck to her became one of the most iconic images of the seventies. An image for which she did not pose and was papped underwater during filming on a closed set.
We are about to see her in what is set to be this year’s most controversial film, Welcome To New York. The film is based on the story of the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and his heiress second wife Anne Sinclair.
Her character is called Simone and not Anne, and Gerard Depardieu plays her husband, the head of a finance fund, called Monsieur Devereaux. The names are changed, but other details from the sex scandal are fully in place. The fictional character is also on course to become the next President of France.
He too is an unrepentant sex addict, a prolific one – we see endless sex – but is undone just like Strauss-Kahn, when he abuses the chambermaid of a smart New York hotel.
Some of the same interrogating officers were used as actors and much of the film is shot in the actual safe house where Strauss-Kahn remained under house arrest. Yet it’s not a biopic, so it can be as racy as it wants.
‘I think of Anne Sinclair as a beauty with a lot of spark and warmth and charisma, and I didn’t have that as a starting point for my Simone. I had an on-going thing that women struggle with – men behaving badly.
‘Gerard’s character moves cheerfully through life, avoids thinking because he has his own adventures. No remorse.
‘A lot of the lines were improvised. She feels like she is losing everything. She is beyond sad and shattered.’
The film is half in French and half in English and Bisset says, ‘I speak French well but not fluently. In the film it’s good because I choose the words I know. There is a lot of improvisation, but with structure.’
Bisset is the only woman in the movie who is not having sex with Depardieu, whose large bulk is naked for a good portion of it. What was he like to work with? ‘Charming most of the time. His acting is compelling. He wasn’t always in a good mood, but his energy is always very strong.
‘There was a love scene we had towards the end where we were both in bed. We weren’t having sex but it was a very tender scene with him. I think I have reached the age where they don’t ask me to do sex scenes any more, and that’s quite a relief.
‘Actresses these days seem so easy with their bodies. The sex scenes seem so realistic. The women used to be always underneath. Now the women are on top. Interesting, isn’t it?’
I wonder if she would have been as frustrated and controlling as her character. Has she ever had a relationship with a sex addict? ‘No, but I’ve known very sexual men. In the film Gerard’s character says he needs the sex to make him feel young. Everybody’s needs are different and everyone’s sexual appetite is different. Some people are fitter and healthier and they like sex more than people who put on weight, and there are some men who are just terribly sexy. Gerard is a man of big appetites generally. He is always talking about restaurants and wine and he’s very charismatic.’
His character though is an addict. He can’t change. ‘I have really tried not to change men. I am good at letting people be who they are, to my own detriment. If you allow somebody to be who they are they can be happy, but that’s not necessarily good for you. It means that you could be having a difficult time.
‘I remember somebody saying to me once, I understand why so and so stays with you. You let him be completely free. I thought he’s just being who he is and I don’t feel threatened by it. He was just very alive and a little bit wild.’
I wonder which of her sexy but wild lovers to which she refers. ‘It doesn’t matter who. I’ve had very good relationships, but where people have had addictions it’s been difficult. People who are artistic often have weak areas and may not be the strongest people in the world. Their thrust for life is powerful, you can’t say they’re weak.
‘I’ve always fallen in love instantaneously and mutually. My heart just becomes alert, a feeling that I’ve known someone for a very long time. You feel like you know them, so you are not in a hurry to know them or change them because you have time. You feel like you are witnessing someone who is witnessing you.
‘I had a good relationship with my father and I understood men pretty well.’ By this I think she means she never put on any pressure for the men to marry her.
She had long – around seven year – relationships with high profile, high-octane men. Firstly They Shoot Horses, Don’t They actor Michael Sarrazin (1967-74), ballet dancer Alexander Godunov (1981-88). In 1988 she met Swiss actor Vincent Perez when they starred in La Maison de Jade, and was with property and hotel magnate Victor Drai in the early nineties. From 1997-2005 she was with martial arts expert Emin Boztepe.
She has given various reasons in the past for not getting married to any of them, such as she didn’t want to live with a man with bad habits, she had a fear of commitment. ‘A variety of things. My first relationship the man had two children and he hadn’t married her so I thought if he hasn’t married that woman he’s not going to marry me. it was at the beginning of our careers and I enjoyed having a relationship with somebody who was teaching me a lot about life.
‘Also I was running backwards and forwards between England and California looking after my mother. She was a priority.’
What happened to her? ‘My mother got MS when she was about 47 and she started to have dementia in her early fifties, so both together it was a hard one. It was awful for her, and not easy for me. I was living in California, but also had a base here.’
Her mother Arlette Alexander was a lawyer turned housewife. During the war she cycled from Paris and boarded a British troop transport to escape the Germans. Bisset’s father Max was a GP.
‘He took off, which was a bit of a shock, as he was a doctor and mummy was really not well. I was about 22 when he finally left her. She was already ill. I did adore my father but I found it hard to imagine that he could leave somebody who was so ill and basically plonk mummy into my lap.
‘He remarried and I got very fond of his wife. They had a son who I am very close to. My father had the child when he was 70 and died when he was 71.
‘The problem was how would I cope with my mother. She had forgotten all about him leaving her. The dementia had set in and some of the painful bits she just forgot. It’s really extraordinary when you think about it. When you are older you can forget painful stuff and reach a state of bliss again.’
At this point she may be trying to be blissful, but the pain she went through is almost tactile. We order a glass of wine and she tries to be jolly.
‘I had to keep finding people who could help. In the end I took her to America. She didn’t know where she was but it was the best thing to do. She had dementia from her early fifties until she died in 1999 at 85.
‘I have a brother, Max, he lives in Miami. He doesn’t like Los Angeles. I was the one that…’ Her voice trails. ‘You just have to be there. Life has to go on and you have to deal with it. I had periods where I just didn’t know what to do and then I gradually started to sort things out with my mother.
‘The men that I was with, it was not always perfect. They didn’t do anything for her, but at least they didn’t nag me and understood that I always had to go and that she was my priority. Sometimes they were playful with her, which she adored. Sometimes you can find a jolly place where you can giggle. You have to give up all conventional thinking. You can’t think is the house tidy etc. The world becomes their world. There were people who were sympathetic and people who weren’t.
‘The thing I found most difficult was that people didn’t want to come and visit me. They would come if there was a meal for them or something, but they didn’t actually come over and just sit with the person who was not well. I think people don’t know how to cope with what was going on. It’s like when somebody dies people don’t know what to say. The biggest thing you could do for somebody who is in a situation like that is offer to give them just a half day off so they can get a break.’ And people did that for her? ‘No, they did not.’
It seems to me that her lack of life partner has nothing to do with lack of commitment but because she was already committed to looking after her mother. Is that the real reason? ‘Well… There are lots of brave people who do these things. For me it was a particular combination of trying to be a successful actress and have a life when my mother was a priority. I got very tired.
‘I put my back out when I was lifting her. I remember there’d be times when she’d be terribly giggly when I couldn’t lift her out of the bath. I had to call the Chelsea police station in order to get help. Some days she would lock herself in the bathroom until I took the lock off the door.
‘When people have Alzheimer’s it’s not every minute of the day, they go in and out. I was always wishing my mother could be more emotionally supportive to me because it was so emotional. It wasn’t a tug of war exactly, but some part of it was.’
Did she feel the need to support her in some weird way because she needed the support herself? ‘God knows what the psychology was. It just had to be dealt with on so many levels and it was all compounding, but eventually I got into the swing of it,’ she says brightly. She hadn’t wanted to talk about any of this. She hates looking back.
She says that she loves being in England but when she’s in California she feels healthier and she has trained herself not to miss being in London and not to miss Cadbury’s chocolate, so we indulge in a chocolate mousse.
Known for her on screen shimmer and incandescent beauty, she reminds me, ‘I’ve done very few raunchy scenes. That stupid photograph underwater. It was tacky, awful. I thought they had covered me up completely. We never saw the rushes. We didn’t know what my T-shirt looked like. I was more worried that I was going to die in the water. I was diving down 30 or 40 or possibly 90 feet of water and when I was swimming down the T-shirt was pressed against me. I think that picture was taken by the National Geographic photographer because he was the only one allowed on the beach. I tried to stop the whole thing, but I’m not going back there. I’ve got over it.’
As a teenager she loved to dance. ‘It got me in a state of bliss and every night I would dream I was choreographing amazing ballets. Margot Fonteyn was my absolute idol.’
So her love of ballet attracted her to Russian primo ballerino Alexander Godunov. ‘He was amazing. He was one of those people that when I met him I thought I knew him already. We were together for seven years and stayed close friends after that. It was complicated.
‘He is dead now. Alcohol killed him (he died at 45 in May 1995 due to complications from hepatitis due to chronic alcoholism). My two longest term relationships died for reasons I would say were alcohol related. (Michael Sarrazin died in 2011 aged 70 of cancer).’
Perhaps this is what she was referring to when she said that it can be negative if you let people be free. ‘I didn’t recognise it. I’d never seen anybody drink like this. I didn’t know what they were doing. The ballet dancer was a great soul and had a great spirit. I’m so sorry it didn’t work out for him.
‘I don’t think I have an addictive personality although I think I can be addicted to people. Certainly I can get passions for them, and that can be dangerous too.’
For the moment she isn’t addicted to anybody. ‘I don’t have a romance now but I have a very nice friendship with somebody. I don’t think I want it to turn into a romance, I don’t know. Am I looking for somebody to have a romance with? I’m not sure. I don’t meet anybody except people who are in relationships already. Everybody says the same thing.
‘I am not on any of those dating websites. I know friends who like them but I’m not sure. If I meet somebody who is my kind of person it’s just boom. I’ve never been a person who dates people. I’m either in it or I’m not. I mean I must have had a date in my life, but very few. I think conversation with a person who is alive is a great thing. I like people who are intelligent and self made. Life is more interesting if you are in a relationship, I do think that,’ she says slightly wistfully, but she never wants to dwell in a sad moment.
She seems to contradict earlier reports that she had a fear of commitment. Her relationships that lasted for seven years did not end because she had a seven year itch. ‘Things could have broken off much sooner but I wouldn’t give up on them. I don’t give up on things. That’s my motto.’
She started off in California because 20th Century Fox offered her a contract in 1967. ‘I didn’t like the idea of being owned by anybody. I didn’t mind if it was a man, but a film studio? I was preoccupied in thinking I have to keep going back to England for my mother. Instead they gave me a ten picture deal and they treated me well, and by that time I’d met an actor in the first film I made in America – The Sweet Ride (1968) – and that was my life then.’
When she was making that first film with Sarrazin in New York she got mugged. ‘I’m easily panicked, but on this occasion I was very calm thinking if they stab me I’ll have to go to one of those hospitals that we’re filming in. please God know. I started talking in ridiculous American jive talk. Suddenly I was talking in another language just as she was doing. She took my wallet and I was calm.’
She is godmother to Angelina Jolie. ‘Unfortunately I don’t have much of a relationship with her but I was really close to her mother. Her mother didn’t have an easy time and neither did Angelina, but whenever I see her I find it extraordinary how calm she always looks.’
Maybe her calm is an act, just like hers? ‘I don’t think so. I’m always worrying about things. One of my fears about living in California is that I am in an area prone to fires. I’m always thinking of what I would save.
‘I was shooting a film in Buffalo and the hotel I was in had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night. The only thing I took with me was the wig for the film. If the wig was gone I would be hanging around until they made another one and I really wanted to get out of that place.’
She tells me with great amusement that a hair salon close to the restaurant we are sitting in today straightened her hair in the late sixties and it all dropped out. ‘So I wore wigs for years. Once I went on location and I took my cat. I’d had him fixed but he still sprayed occasionally and he sprayed on my wig when I was out filming. I was in Denver and when I came back to my room there was a horrendous smell and then I discovered it was my wig that he sprayed on.’
She shrugs it off reminding me that she was friends with Sharon Tate and was round at her house a few days before she died at the hands of Charles Manson. ‘She invited me to come over the following Friday. I cancelled at the last minute. And that was the day she was murdered.
‘Los Angeles changed completely almost overnight. Fear and paranoia and no one had a clue where it was coming from. It didn’t make me want to leave but it made me fearful. I am less fearful now. I feel like I have a big spirit and I am a lover of life and I don’t live in the past.’
With that we finish the chocolate mousse and she embraces me goodbye.

Susan Sarandon has never become a homogenised version of herself. She’s always sparky, curious and in the moment. On her wrist there is a tattoo. It looks like a piece of barbed wire but it actually says “A new dawn, a new day” to remind her ‘Every day you come into the world and are born again a new person.’
She has been a life long activist, a passionate actress. She won an Oscar for playing a nun in Dead Man Walking. But she also likes to have fun. She works constantly. Today she’s wearing leggings, iridescent sneakers and a loose white blouse. Her eyes orbital and alive.

Sarandon loves a road movie. The metaphor for the emotional and intellectual journey and its liberation. She is, after all. The star of the most iconic road movie in the history of film; Thelma And Louise.

Her latest movie Tammy is another story set on the road. Tammy, played by Melissa McCarthy has been fired from her thankless job in a greasy burger bar. Goes home to find her husband cheating on her with her neighbour. She wants to escape her miserable life. She has no car for her only option with cash and a roadworthy vehicle is her grandmother Pearl, played by Sarandon who is addicted to alcohol and pills.

‘I’m a pill popping alcoholic fun loving granny. What’s interesting is there are moments in the film which are surprisingly emotional and very different from what you’ve seen Melissa do thus far. At the same time there’s a lot of humour – an interesting combination.’

The real life Sarandon is ultra cool, comfortable in her own skin. She exudes a kind of confidence that meshes with a ripe sexuality. She’s 67 and still completely hot – curvaceous yet svelte figure.

The world shook when five years ago she split from actor Tim Robbins, her partner of 23 years. Everyone thought they were so comfortable they’d be together forever. Sarandon has never enjoyed cosy.
She embraced the new phase in her life ‘with terror and excitement in equal parts.’ And is now with Jonathan Bricklin, 37, her partner in her ping-pong club Spin and a collaborator on many projects in real life. But more of him later.

At an age when most mothers are admonishing their children for getting tattoos Sarandon discovered the joy of ink. She’s never been conventional and has always hated labels.
For her character in Tammy she wears a grey curly wig and frumpy clothes. How did she feel about being portrayed as her first screen grandmother? Wasn’t that a little bit frightening?
‘Not really.’ They worked it out that I could be her grandmother if I had her mum when I was 16and she had her baby when she was 16. I certainly look old in it but I didn’t want to wear tons of prosthetics. I think they did a good job with lighting and concentrating on and exaggerating all my bad features. Although I do have to wear fake ankles because they’re supposed to swell.

‘I thought it was interesting work and different to everything I’ve done lately because there was lots of improv. It’s all about the people you work with and I worked with great people here.’
With Sarandon it’s always about the work, never the label and she reminds me, ‘I was a grandmother in Lovely Bones of little kids, but I tell them not to call me grandma. My character was trying to be chic and trying to pretend she wasn’t getting older. (In fact she looks super glamorous and age defying in that movie – a Jackie O with leopard skin accessories).
‘The idea of being a grandmother, of course it didn’t bother me. I’m about to be a grandmother in real life and the concept hasn’t seemed particularly crippling. I didn’t think of it in that way. It was more trying to figure out how to do the part and make it multi-layered. It’s tricky because she’s taking drugs and then she’s high, but then she’s not high and she’s taking pain pills because her feet are swollen. Everyone’s making such a big deal about the fact it’s a grandma. I just wanted to make it believable.

Did she have any moments of vanity where she was terrified of what she actually looked like? ‘When I saw the stills after the movie was done and I saw all these funny faces I did think I hope this is better when I am moving. It was really extreme in a photo.’ She laughs a languid laugh.
In the movie the rug-braiding pill popping grandmother wants to go to Niagara Falls. ‘Yes and we take a very circuitous route there. Of course you’re taking a metaphorical trip as well a real trip and other than weddings and funerals I can’t think of anything that begs for drama more than a road trip because you’re gathering people together and there’s a lot of tension. When you throw new people in the mix on their journey it’s a classic device for drama and a time for a character to change.
‘When you’re in a car it’s a good way to force characters into new situations. I’m always getting scripts where a middle aged couple whose marriage is undergoing some kind of change or needs to change, goes on a road trip.’
Tammy needs to undergo emotional change after she finds her husband involved with her neighbour. ‘My character is not in a position to give anyone advice because I’ve made so many mistakes. Various truths come out in the journey. Both of us have our comeuppance. We get straightened out and come back together again.’
Making the same mistakes over and over again is a definition of madness. The real life Sarandon rather enjoys making mistakes for the experience of growth they often bring.
‘I definitely learn from my mistakes. I welcome them. I am always disappointed if I start repeating mistakes. I don’t have the constitution to be addicted to anything. I don’t like drinking. I much prefer marijuana to booze. And I don’t do anything excessively. I don’t have the appetite to over indulge so I’ve never been in trouble that way.’
What advice would she give to someone who is dealing with a beak-up after they’ve been betrayed? ‘The first thing you have to do is make sure that you don’t think of yourself as a victim. It’s a very humiliating experience to betrayed and you have to see it somehow – which probably takes a little bit of time – as an opportunity to re-frame your life and go on to have some kind of in-depth conversation about why that would happen.’
There in a nutshell – never see yourself as a victim – is a key to Sarandon’s strength and ever-present vibrancy. But there’s also vulnerability. She seems entirely connected to herself at all times, which makes her hugely charismatic.
Her career started off with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was Brooke Shields’ hooker mother in Pretty Baby where she also had a tortured affair with its director Louis Male. She was the most unvictimy cancer victim in Stepmom.
She was born the eldest of nine children in Queens, New York City and brought up as a Catholic. ‘One doesn’t recover from that childhood!’
She left home at 17 and married her college sweetheart Chris Sarandon when she was just 20. ‘At that time it was impossible to stay in school and live together as we were at Catholic university, so we got married.’ They were divorced 12 years later and she never married again.

Her daughter Eva’s father was the film director Franco Amurri. She got pregnant by accident soon after they met. She met Tim Robbins when they were filming Bull Durham and had two sons, Jack Henry and Miles. She has always enjoyed passionate, consuming relationships. ‘Even the ones that nearly killed me.’
In her twenties she had a breakdown and refused any pharmaceutical help. ‘I wouldn’t have reached any of those crises in my later life because I would have been prozaced out. It worries me that people see pain as an alien thing. There won’t be any poetry written soon if everyone is on such an even keel.’
She doesn’t attribute her breakdown to a single factor, but the role of being a constant pleaser, nurturer and caretaker seems to have been a destructive element. ‘Anyone that is trying to please everyone is going to have a frustrating life. I had grown up to believe that love conquers and being a Catholic I believed if you’re good, good things happen. You have that expectation, but you soon realise that love does not conquer all. That life’s not fair.

‘Yes there have been times when I did see myself as a victim. That’s why I don’t tend towards that now. I’m also not a blamer. If anything I take too much responsibility for everything that happens and I always say I suffer from pro-noia as opposed to paranoia. I think everything that happens the universe is firing in my favour. Anything that’s difficult is also an opportunity. It doesn’t mean at times things aren’t really hurtful, but you just have to accept being hurt as part of life and decide where you want to go.

‘Sometimes when you are betrayed the other person doesn’t want to deal with what led to the betrayal because the betrayal itself is a symptom, not the be all and end all. It is possible to work through a testing of a relationship and come out stronger. It is possible if you have the toolkit to accomplish that – but everyone doesn’t have that.
‘I would say lean on those who make you feel good about yourself and do something where you can clear your head. You are just a tiny dot in a huge cosmos so try to put it in perspective. Everyone has a few bad days but you can’t let it define you. You can’t be defined by someone else’s act, not being able to deliver what you need. Sometimes betrayal is a wake-up call that something has to change.’
When she talks about this it’s from a place deep in her soul; a vulnerable, wise place. She’s known pain and has been made all the stronger by her capacity to feel it. Did she employ these techniques in the healing process after she split from Tim Robbins?
‘I’ve tried to employ these things whenever I’ve had any kind of huge change, and there have been many. The good thing about crashing and burning young is you start to build somewhere in your memory that you can get through this. It is much more difficult for people who hold on and on and never just completely destruct.
‘Once you destruct it’s like a rebirth and birthing is painful. New things are exhilarating and terrifying. Every major transition is a combination of both of these things. And sometimes we mistake excitement as you are going towards the unknown for terror because they feel very much the same.
‘Even when I choose parts in a movie I should be terrified and excited. I don’t want to get lazy. And Tammy was a real stretch to keep me alert in a way that I might not have been, and that’s a good thing.’
This is exactly how she felt about her relationship with Bricklin. When they first started together she refused to label him a boyfriend. She preferred to call him a collaborator. ‘I now say we are a work in progress. We’ve started a production company together called Reframed Pictures. It gives finishing funds to documentaries and our ping pong project that we’ve been doing together is getting more and more sophisticated. We’ve brought in a new CEO who knows a lot more about running a business and franchising.
‘And I am going to become a grandmother in August. I’m not terrified about that but it is exciting. My daughter has a wonderful husband. He’s going to make a great father. She’s read everything you could possibly read. When I was having a baby I felt it was science fiction until they were actually there. Then you suddenly get your mind around it; a new person in the world because of us. We had a lovely baby shower for her in the same friend’s apartment where I had my shower when I was expecting her. So some of the same people were there.’
She has always been extremely close to her children and enjoyed being a mother for the third time when she was 45. Miles is still living at home. ‘He just left Brown (University). He’s done a lot of travelling. He’s a DJ and a musician. I think he’s here with me for another year until he gets away with earning money down solid. My elder son is in California. He is making a documentary about the homeless and a mocumentary about a DJ.’
Does she ever suffer loneliness and separation from her children? ‘Actually I just texted my youngest where did you go? Because he didn’t come home last night. I don’t like to be too naggy but I like to know what’s going on. I talk to my daughter constantly. We’ve always been very close. I like having older kids. I like the way the relationship keeps changing. I like learning to back off and watch them making their own mistakes.’
Do they share her strong political beliefs? ‘They all have a good value system in varying degrees. They are aware of the world situation. They tend to be driven more by humanitarian aid rather than by politics.’
Does she still believe her activism can make a difference? ‘Absolutely. I’ve seen lives one by one change. For instance when my son did the film about the homeless he went across the United States in the hope of dispelling the myth about who is homeless and how hard it is to be on the streets. In a week we go before a committee in DC to testify to try and make violence against homeless people a hate crime because it’s on the rise and it’s ugly. I see it when I work with grass roots groups. One person at a time can really change the world.’
Is it true that her mother is a Republican? ‘It is true. She is a serious one. In the lead up to the war Bush got in touch with her and she was put on talk shows to help get his ratings up. I grew up with a strong need for justice. Even with my dolls I would rotate their dresses to make sure one didn’t get the pretty dress all the time. Fairness meant a lot to me.
‘I came at an age where our issues were much clearer, when there wasn’t a blackout by corporate press. In Vietnam you saw what was happening with riots and those things. It made sense for a young person to be seduced by them.’
Did she ever have a heated debate with her mother? ‘Not really. Sometimes we talk but I don’t think there’s any point. The last time gay marriage came up and whilst she’s very much for civil union she’s not for gay marriage, she couldn’t understand it.
It was very hurtful to me when she went on the O’Reilly TV show. He did a Top 10 look at my ‘un-American activities’ and used her as a way of getting people to watch it. That was a scary time for me in the lead-up to Iraq. So I just have to assume she doesn’t really get it.’
There is no blame in her tone. True to her word Sarandon is never the victim.

Susan Sarandon – April 8, 2012

Susan Sarandon has never become a homogenised version of herself. She’s never let herself be dull or diluted.
In her latest movie Jeff, Who Lives At Home, she plays the uptight mother of two very different and equally annoying sons played by Jason Segel and Ed Helms.
What you notice is she’s not afraid to let the camera come in at an extreme close-up. The whole screen takes in her face and you are devoured in it. You think there’s something defiant about this, you see bravery, you see good skin, lined yes, but you don’t notice that. You notice a commanding presence.
Her face itself is incredible. Unbelievably she’s 65. She’s not had botox or eye lifts. She had lypo on her jaw some time ago, but her face is as vibrant as it was 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. She’s not afraid to let you see all the emotions flash through it.
When we meet I am struck by how dainty she is. She is wearing dark navy skinny jeans, a lose silky creamy top, no shoes and a shiny scarlet pedicure. Her hair in chestnut waves floats beyond her shoulders and her eyes are orbital and exactly the same colour as her hair.
She has a gravelly purr when she speaks. She hasn’t yet seen the movie or her impressive close-up yet. She puts her relaxed screen presence down to how much she enjoyed working with the Duplass brothers, (directors Jay and Mark) who work largely from improvisation, something which she enjoys because it keeps her on her toes.
‘They don’t set up a long shot or a medium shot. They don’t say these are your close-ups so you are not even aware of them. There’s not a self-consciousness or a loneliness. Whenever I’m in a close-up single (she means close-ups taken after the scene) I’m thinking where is the other person.
‘They use more than one camera. Jay operates one and Mark watches the monitor. Mark is a little more outgoing in terms of his notes. Both my boys came to visit me and immediately hit it off with both of them.’ By her boys she means her sons Jack Henry, 22, and Miles, 19.
She has an extremely close relationship with all of her children. She has always been interested in them. She told me once that they came out of her womb exactly how they are. Jack was very loud and came out quickly, ‘he is a people person, whereas Miles is more like me. My daughter (Eva, 27) could have been an alien she was such a strong presence.’ She told me then in her house there were no followers, only leaders.
‘Jay ended up being a great mentor to my son Jack Henry when he was at USC. He looked at his film and was inspirational.’
Jack Henry and Miles still have a space in the family home, but they are not like Jeff in the movie, who lives in the basement smoking weed and in his basketball shorts.
The movie takes place all in one day where Jeff/Segel looks for a sign that might change his life and make his life mean something. He doesn’t connect with his mother or his older brother Pat played by Ed Helms, who feels his life will mean something now that he’s bought a Porsche that he can’t afford.
‘Jack Henry got a job making a documentary going across country looking at the different demographics of homeless people.’ Jack Henry seems already politically aware like his parents. ‘At the moment he’s in New Orleans (where Jeff was shot) and coincidentally Tim (Robbins) is directing TV series Treme there. He’ll be back in New York with me when he finishes that, probably for the summer.
‘Tim had a house in New Orleans even before we split. Miles (her other son) is at Brown but comes back to New York to DJ in the city. ‘It’s not an empty nest. My kids are still in the basement,’ she says with a mixture of relief and pride.
She can say the name Tim Robbins without any emotional resonance or weirdness. It is two and a half years since they split after being together for 21 years after they met on the set of the movie Bill Durham. Sarandon was 40 when she got that part of a sexy intellectual baseball groupie. She’s never allowed herself to be labelled too young for this, too old for that. She played her first mother when she was 31 in Pretty Baby directed by Louis Malle, with whom she was also having an affair.
Although she never seemed part of a couple because she’s such a strident individual, while she won acclaim for Thelma And Louise and won an Oscar playing a nun opposite Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, it seemed a given that hers and Robbins’ was an equal and loving relationship.
The world was shocked when it broke down. “Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have split up. Has the world come to an end?” One blog post read.
Sarandon and Robbins defy all the various theories that were tossed around at the time. Particularly the one that she being 11 years older than him wanted a quieter life. If anything the opposite is true. She never wants to be quiet. She’s working on more projects than ever including parts in Robot And Frank with Frank Langella and Liv Tyler, The Company You Keep with Robert Redford and Julie Christie and Arbitrage with Richard Gere and Tim Roth, and recurring roles in 30 Rock and Big C.
‘It’s important to be interested. I thought I was going to take a few months off and then things kept coming up. I only pick parts that I really want to do. Often they’re not major parts but they’re things I haven’t done before or people I want to work with, like 30 Rock. It was a reprise of something I’d done before and those people are talented, fun. If a part is the kind of person I’m not comfortable with it’s all the more fun. The world opens up to you if you do these things. Somebody said does it get easier? I don’t think it gets easier, but it gets better. It’s a little scary but I feel like I’m living an authentic life right now. I feel happy. I feel I have more options because the kids are older and my situation being what it is. I feel like travelling more. We did a trip down to the Grand Canyon, my kids and some friends. We camped under the stars. No phones, nothing. It was crazy,’ she says savouring the word.
A couple of years ago she opened a ping pong club in New York called Spin and got obsessed with it because girls could beat boys and old ladies could beat jocks.
At the time of the split with Robbins she told me that she was ‘excited and terrified in equal parts.’ How is she now? ‘I think I’m about there, maybe slightly less terrified but I think so much is new and the kids are going through new stages, they are kind of educating me. It’s definitely different. Everything scares me. When I take a part I take a part because it scares me. I’m used to being scared. I find that a good sign. Life is massive, you need to be awake.’ She looks right at me, almost through me, to make her point.
I have read stories, I tell her, that say she is definitely dating her ping pong partner Jonathan Bricklin and other stories that say that’s not true. I have no idea what to believe? ‘Yeh,’ she says, in a kind of pleased with herself growl. So which is it? ‘I’d say we are collaborators in a lot of different areas.’ I laugh. ‘We have a lot of projects in different areas.’
So… does she like him? ‘He’s a great guy but I hate that expression dating.’ I agree with her it’s an awkward euphemism which she imagines I won’t find a way round. There’s nothing else for it. I ask her is she fucking him? She smiles, all coy. ‘Don’t you like the word collaborating?’
The thing is, no matter how brilliant an actor Sarandon is, and she is, she cannot lie. ‘I’m not a good liar, so say whatever you’ll say.’ Collaborating in many areas is a good phrase. ‘Unless it’s the war and you are French.’
If it was the war and Sarandon was French she would definitely be in the Resistance. She loves a cause and she would fight it with all her heart. She’s a committed liberal in every possible way. Rather the opposite to her character in the movie who is very irritated that her son is still living at home.
‘Because of the economic situation these days you could have two degrees and still not have a job or be able to afford rent, or you get a divorce. So families live together. In Italy, in Israel there’s a lot more families living together. Even if you’re married you save up to get a house. It’s never been seen necessarily that these people are slackers. The problem is children returning home that are twenty something and they still want you to do their laundry and their friends come over and trash the place. Sharon (her character in the movie) is worn out because Jeff is in the basement smoking weed.’ And her own boys would never do such a thing? ‘I don’t know about that. But they do their own laundry.’
She seems to like the idea that she never had to face empty nest syndrome. Her children didn’t so much rebel against her but with her. She’s very proud of the fact that she got her tattoo before her son Jack.
How old was she when she left home? ‘I left home at 17 and never came back. My spot got completely disappeared. I got married when I was 20 after my senior year. Chris Sarandon was a graduate student. He already had a job, so I went where he went. Crazy. What was I thinking?
Why did she get married? ‘I got married to say thank you. He was the first man I slept with and he was so kind and so patient and at that time to stay in school and live together was impossible at Catholic universities. Things have changed, but now it seems like there’s an influx of people who want to get married, including my daughter,’ she says slight incredulous.
Sarandon never married again. Her daughter Eva’s father was film director Franco Amurri. Their relationship was never intended to last. She got pregnant early on at 39 because she came off the pill having been told that she had endometriosis and couldn’t get pregnant. Shortly after she met Robbins, the father of Jack Henry and Miles. Sarandon has always enjoyed passionate consuming relationships. ‘Even ones that nearly killed me,’ she once told me.
Is one marriage enough for her? ‘Oh yeh. I really can’t imagine it. Even when I got married we never said it was going to be forever, it was a kind of practical decision. I don’t think I ever thought of it as something that would be a huge deal. But every year we renewed. We decided not with an actual ceremony but just said should we go through the next year. Actually I think it’s good relationship strategy. We should revisit this before we have children to see if everybody is still on the same page and you have established that you have an option of it being nobody’s failure.’
Did she renew frequently with Tim? ‘No, we were not married. It wasn’t about renewing anything. I felt married, I felt committed.’
There’s a slight pause here, a slight little nag at her heart. ‘If you have children they are never out of your life.’
She takes a sip from a brownish purple looking juice. It’s a cold fruit tea ‘to keep up my strength instead of caffeine. I crash after coffee.’
She has a ring on her thumb which says in French ‘One must live not just exist.’ I bought it for myself and it was delivered to me on the day of Louis Malle’s memorial, which I thought was interesting since he was French and I’d been with him for a number of years.’
She was with Louis Malle for two years in the late seventies. The relationship with Malle was turbulent. She felt that she was the one who had to permanently surrender to him because she was the actor and he was the director.
‘I always believe that lovers and certain people come into your life as well as certain jobs, for a reason. Even if it may not be clear at the time.’
There isn’t any victim energy about her, yet she’s always managed to be vulnerable. That takes power. Even the pain she seems to have utilised. In fact she rather enjoys embracing huge and raw emotions. Like her ring says, she doesn’t want to just exist.
‘This is the Cartier bracelet my daughter gave me for my 60th birthday. She saved up for it. I can’t take it off that easily. I did a number of episodes for the Big C and wore it because it means so much to me. It reminds me of my tattoo. The tattoo round her wrist looks like a strand of barbed wire but it actually says “a new dawn a new day” to remind her to live in the present. Round her neck is a piece of glass that she found in a street in New York that is the shape of a heart. In her ear is a gold safety pin and the other ear has a diamond hoop.
‘This is my daughter’s baby pin. Someone gave it to me.’ One ear says Pirate, the other ear says Punk.
‘The virgin and the gypsy,’ she says as she curls her feet under her looking effortlessly sultry. I can’t imagine that she was ever a virgin. ‘But I am over and over again every day.’ I’m wondering if this idea comes because she wants to constantly renew everything or because of her Catholic upbringing. ‘One doesn’t recover from that childhood.’
In her case she’s never stopped rebelling against it. Recently she caused a furore at the Hamptons Film Festival calling the Pope a Nazi. This movie includes a girl on girl kiss. ‘It was a starter kiss.’ Sarandon is an old hand at lesbian screen sex. In The Hunger she was full-on with Catherine Deneuve.
‘Someone asked me the other day was that upsetting (for her to kiss a girl) and I said I guess you never saw The Hunger. The Hunger love scene took four days and there was much more body contact than that. In the beginning of the film I was much more uncomfortable. Just being that uptight and nasty all the time was uncomfortable. But I guess it will cause somebody to say now you are going to get the religious right down on you again.’ In actual fact it’s quite romantic.
‘Did you know it’s a big trend for women who are divorced to get together with other women and start a new life? I don’t know how much sex had to do with it. The question is about the courage it takes to be intimate with another person. It’s not about your age, colour or gender, it is do you ever want to be vulnerable and expose yourself to that vulnerability. It takes courage to put your hand out to the other person and say let’s see what happens. It’s huge,’ she says.
She is mesmerising when she talks about this. I can’t help but wonder is she talking about herself and the courage it took her to er, collaborate.
She says she doesn’t have any new tattoos but her daughter just got a very big one of a hummingbird. They are a tight nit bunch, the family that gets tattoos together. ‘I went with Jack to get his. And when I got the one on my back Eva got one that said “Conscious’ meaning being awake.
‘Both my boys are very sweet. Miles is thinking of getting a smiley face but he’s not quite sure. I think he’ll get one,’ she nods approvingly.
Most children get tattoos to rebel against their parents, but she got hers first. ‘I know it’s horrible. Jack was a little upset that I got one before he did. Maybe it’s bad for kids when they don’t have anything to rebel against. There were things that I was strict about, but not tattoos.’
What were they? ‘I was strict about how much time they would spend watching TV when they were growing up. Violence in films. Sex not so much. I was worried about the double standard. I wanted my boys to understand that blow jobs do ruin a girl’s reputation and that they were responsible as much as she was and they had to understand the ramifications for other people involved. I was strict about them keeping in touch when they go away and about them being kind to each other.’
Once again the opposite to the character she plays. ‘I just don’t think she gets her son,’ she says incredulously. ‘Often the woman is the Wendy to everyone else’s Peter Pan. You get tired with that. At one point I rebelled and stopped wearing a watch. I know nowadays everyone has a phone but then it meant I’m not going to keep telling you you have a game, you have to start to figure out what time to be there. Why does it have to be me that keeps nagging?’
Partly she has always taken responsibility for other people and been the facilitator because she is the oldest of nine. It was expected of her. There’s a sense that she’s done with all that and feels freer.
‘I remember reading the book that said the mum is the entrée and dad is dessert. He’s not around as much and everyone wants dessert. I was the one that dealt with the school forms, the schedules, the packed lunches, the shopping. And that’s the curse of the competent woman. No one opens the door for them.’ She flicks back her hair looking decidedly un-cursed.

The first thing you notice about Susan Sarandon is how comfortable she feels in her own body. She often talks about how proud she is of her breasts, but it’s more than that. There is something about how connected she is to herself that makes her hugely charismatic and somewhat cosy to be with.

She is instantly accessible, perching on a little sofa in Claridges hotel wondering why the green tea is brown. She is wearing black jeggings, new balance trainers, an oversized sweater with a cream lace shirt underneath. A curious outfit, yet somehow you notice her not its oddness.

Her skin is flawless, her eyes huge and all consuming. She is not afraid to look at you and she’s not afraid to let you look right in at her. It’s an open face. No slyness, no manipulation, She is renowned for being a woman who doesn’t fear most things, and certainly doesn’t fear speaking her mind.

It is that truth telling that later on in the interview makes us come a little undone. But more of that later.

To start off we are embracing her fearlessness that makes her sexy at any age whether she is doing a lesbian love scene with Catherine Deneuve, as in The Hunger, driving off a cliff in Thelma and Louise, or reinventing the screen granny as she does in The Lovely Bones. Leopard skin accessories, Jackie O hair and racoon eyes, she’s the sexiest thing in the movie that is a meditation on death. She can get away with political earnestness and make it look passionate, not dull.

We’ve met before. The last time a few years ago. She turned up feeling sick, had to go and vomit half way through the interview, but she didn’t want to cancel because it might have inconvenienced me. She is old school, show must go on.

Today she is feeling healthy. She talks about her new regime of dehydrated fruits and vegetables with gusto, and her ping pong club in New York. Then she’ll give you a catalogue of what drugs she’s done and what exactly they do. There is no self-conscious talking about the movie even though there’s an awards buzz already for her.

She won an Oscar for playing the nun in Dead Man Walking. She likes tortured movies. She also likes to have fun. Her career started off in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was Brooke Shields’ hooker mother in Pretty Baby where she went on to have a long and tortured affair with its director Louis Malle. She specialises in every nuance of the mother role, making them in turns forceful, sexy and unsentimental. She was the most unvictimy cancer victim in Stepmom. You never see her moaning in life or movies.

She’s just come from Sweden where she got a lifetime achievement award, but she’s more excited that she met a table tennis gold medallist, “because I have opened a ping pong bar in Manhattan and I want him to come.” Her sons Jack Henry, 20, and Miles, 17, have both deejayed there and it was one of the coolest places in Manhattan before it had even had a liquor licence.

“Girls can beat boys, old ladies can beat young guys, and little girls can beat older guys. It’s about strategy, and you can’t get hurt…” Her eyes do that spinning thing that they do when she’s excited. Her ping pong fever started when she was working with an editor who was also making a documentary about ping pong. “I wouldn’t say that I play very well but I make it possible for other people to play well. I like facilitating them.”

Facilitating, nurturing, making things happen, organising, are all at the core of her. It’s to do with her consummate mother energy. The oldest child of seven, a lifetime of doing things for other people. But who facilitates her?

“Not enough people, she says with a dryness that comes right from the back of her throat. That’S the curse of the confident woman. Most people know that if you take care of yourself and open your own doors they stop opening them for you. It’s harder to ask for help because you get in the habit of taking care of yourself, and I think you forget how to ask.” Her eyes look searching now. “I am trying to change all of that. I am trying to repattern myself now that my youngest is out of the house.” The change seems to scare her and excite her in equal parts. The change is something she refers back to many times, it’s a big deal, a new her.

She peers into her cup of brown green tea. She doesn’t want to complain about her tea but she says, “Coffee is awfully tasty. I love the taste of coffee.” She’s on a regime. “I celebrated my 63rd birthday and got blood tests and saw a nutritionist. I want to do a preemptive strike on whatever is building up in me so I’m travelling with this dehydrated green stuff and red stuff and cutting out all sugar and all liquor. I rarely drink, so that wasn’t hard. The bad one was bread. I love bread. I cheat sometimes. When I did the play (Exit The King on Broadway) I got run down and was drinking serious caffeine, so I needed to clean up my act. I’m very susceptible to drugs of every kind. Coffee, it’s great because it gets me very up, but then I crash.”

I tell her I find coffee comforting. It doesn’t make me particularly speedy. She surmises authoritatively, “You are probably someone who takes Ritalin to calm them.”

When she says drugs have such an effect on her, what kind of drugs does she mean? “I mean anything! I’m not really interested in drinking. Tequila maybe, but champagne makes me fall asleep. It doesn’t take much. When I’m travelling I only need to take half an Ambien to sleep on the plane. I love mushrooms and I’ve done those successfully, but I don’t like anything chemical. I didn’t like LSD and ecstacy wouldn’t agree with me. I like stuff you can smoke.”

I tell her that I’m the opposite. The stuff you smoke makes me paranoid and depressed. “Oh that’s sad,” she says in a heartfelt way as if she’s running through all the good times that I’ll never have. “Everyone is wired differently. Some people can do stuff that others can’t. That’s what I told my kids. Some drugs can kill you. Some are not even worth trying. Some are a lot of fun, so talk to me first.”

It doesn’t surprise me that seven minutes into our interview we are discussing chemical versus herbal drugs in great detail. Sarandon is curious and open. Some things she just can’t be bothered to hide or be polite about. She took drugs, so what. She doesn’t watch her words and thinks she has to recreate a cleaner, blander, less-lived self for the purpose of an interview. She carries no weight of shame or self-consciousness.

She once said it was her ambition to be the longest working actor. She works a lot, but not in a divaish compulsive way. She doesn’t need a star role, just one with meat on it. She loved working with Peter Jackson because, “he knew what he wanted. It was a very pleasant experience. I’ve been on films where I didn’t particularly like the director, which wasn’t the case here. You don’t have to be best friends with someone but if they are passionate you respect them. I’ve also worked with directors who are just trying to get to dinner. They want their martini and to get out of there. And that’s a terrible thing. I’ve done a number of low budget indie films lately where the director has also been the writer and they have cut at the bequest of the powers that be the very things that made their movies special because they think by homogenising a product it will appeal to the most amount of people and it will make the most money. Instead what happens is a watered down version of what you thought it was.”

Sarandon has never become a homogenised version of herself, so it makes sense that this would irk her. Did she suffer by working on thing that were quirky and got homogenised? “Yeh. They’re still waiting to come out,” she deadpans. She doesn’t want to say which ones they are but Solitary Man, Leaves Of Grass and The Greatest are all indie films with writer directors.

She’s not bitter, just bemused. “I wouldn’t have done them if those scenes had been out. People who are deciding how to market your film live in fear, so they are constantly trying to change the very thing they agreed on in the first place. Imagine in that movie with Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller (There’s Something About Mary), if the hair scene had been cut out? Imagine people saying, ‘oh that goes too far’…

“When I did Dead Man Walking (for which she wore nun make-up and won an Oscar) people were trying to get me to have an affair or the guy not to die. The whole movie would have been completely different.” In it she stays a nun and Sean Penn, the man on death row. does die, and it is of course brilliant. Someone who wouldn’t stand up for themselves puzzles her because that’s so alien to who she is.

“I’m not talking about the studio wanting to change things, I’m talking about the indie people!” Sarandon does not believe in a happy ending. She believes that pain is part of life. She believes in confronting it rather than coating with sentiment.

Did Lovely Bones make her think about mortality? “Well, I’m always thinking about it… I think it was interesting to think about how grief is processed. I remember talking to some firefighters wives months after 9/11 and them saying I’m still angry. People don’t understand.”

We talk briefly about how grief, just like drugs, affects people differently. It’s a chemical process. We agree the coping mechanism is to disconnect from the pain until something in a movie that you are watching or something in a song suddenly reconnects you to it in an unexpected moment.

“I am just like that. I am so busy getting everyone else through it I don’t luxuriate in whatever it is you have to go through.” She sighs, perhaps recoiling from her lifelong role of being the enabler, the strong woman who gets everyone else through it.

In Wall Street 2 Sarandon plays Shia LaBeouf’s mum. “She speaks for the smaller people who have been damaged by the economic situation. Her original profession was nurse. Then she started flipping houses in exclusive neighbourhoods, the kind of gate communities on Long Island where Shia’s character is from. She gets over extended when the bubble bursts and is a casualty, and comes to depend on her son to bail her out. He is having his own financial problems and this puts more pressure on him.

“It’s a small part, but Oliver insisted it was an important part because she is the only one who is not that high level of trading that the rest of the movie is about. People can identify with her.

“If you are running a small business you are constantly worried because very few people can make it because the banks are no longer lending in the way they were. But her job is a realtor. Hopefully I’m funny and I get a few laughs.”

What was it like working with Shia? “He educated himself. He actually worked on Wall Street and immersed himself into that world, so I was very impressed. I like him a lot. He’s a really keen kind of kid that works so hard.”

What was the most difficult thing about your character? “I had to smoke and that was very difficult. The first scene at eight in the morning I was smoking and by lunch I was so ill. Later on in the movie I had given up smoking, but Oliver still wanted it.

“I got to wear lots of jewellery and long nails, so that stuff was fun. In the beginning they were long and manicured, and then they came off when times got tough. I think that’s the difference when you have a regular income coming in, your self maintenance. In the beginning her hair is done and she has long French nails. And the next time she has hit rock bottom and has become kind of undone.

“I really admire entrepreneurs and I realise from running the ping pong bar, one little thing goes wrong and your profits are gone. Oliver keeps insisting that he’s a great ping pong player, but I don’t know if he can actually play. Josh Brolin turns out to be very good and took on Mel Gibson. When I play I have a really good time. You don’t get hurt, you can be of any age and gender and stand a good chance of beating somebody. Little girls can beat 35-year old muscle men, and geeky kids can dominate. It’s very good for the right side of your brain and they say that’s good for alzheimers.”

There’s something about her though that loves it because it restructures any kind of caste or class system. Her story in Wall Street is about losing her quality of life and surviving and finding a happier place. How does she survive? Does she choose movies for money or for art? Did she ever do a movie just for the money?

“Usually when a script comes with a huge offer it’s going to be bad, but then you decide what you are going to do. There are lots of variables. Sometimes you do a money job in order to finance a job where you are not going to make money. You do it for the experience. I have never said no to anything I wanted to do and I have never turned down a film because I didn’t get the money. If I really want to do a film I do it.”

Are you a spender or a saver? “I don’t really have any relationship with money one way or the other. I don’t really hoard it, but I’m not a big spender. I consume where my kids are concerned and I spend money on travel and trees. But I am not a buyer of jewellery or clothing and nor do I spend a lot of time in beauty parlours. What becomes clearer as I get older is I’m less interested in accumulating stuff. I love to buy presents for friends if I see something that’s perfect for them. If I had tons of money I would buy Gore Vidal’s house. A really pricey watch or pocketbook I can’t really understand.

“I really don’t think of money that much. Even when I was growing up and didn’t have it, it seemed like I would always be able to get an avocado or the new Beatles album. I never felt like I was poor when I was poor. It’s good to know I have money to send my kids to school and bring them home for the holidays, but I am fairly cautious and I would never invest in the stock market. I don’t like to lose, so I’m not a good gambler. I don’t have the gambling gene.”

Perhaps her whole life has been part of bigger emotional gambles, so she’s never had to exercise that muscle in casinos. “Perhaps. Certainly a lot of actors gamble. I think it’s easier to not know what’s going to happen when you’re in this business because you trained yourself to get used to that. I feel sorry for the people who dedicate 35 years of their lives to a job and get laid off. They compromise for security and at the last minute that security is not there. My daughter is working as an actress now. At 24 she’s already learning to make use of her down time because she doesn’t know when she’s going to work again.”

How about emotionally? Do you take emotional gambles? “I do. I follow my heart because my feeling if I don’t is much worse than if I get crushed. I try to bounce back and it gets you to the next place. Again, that is a muscle you develop when you act. You develop not an immunity to pain or insecurity, but in the back of your psyche you know you can survive if you hold on long enough because you’ve been up and down long enough.
“I believe in serendipity. I believe it is one of the things that has given me an incredible life, the fact that I am able to get off a train and change direction.”

Changing direction with Tim Robbins must have been a major emotional traffic jam. After so many year of being such a solidly shimmering couple whose love seemed so earnest and true it would never break down it shocked the world that they were no longer together.”Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have split up. Has the world come to an end?” one blog post read. Everyone is shocked. And what of Sarandon? Is that why she wants to reinvent herself? Unleash her old patterns? Radically detox physically and emotionally? She is not just scared and excited about her green and red pills. It’s her whole new emotional landscape. How is she navigating the separation? “We are just focusing on all the good things that we have accomplished in our lives, in our careers, in the world and especially in our family over the last 20 years. That’s how we are dealing with it.”
But is she OK? Is she on the road to survival? “Yes. I am in that place of excited and terrified, and that’s probably how you should live your life all the time.”

Has she lived her life like that all the time? “I think to be authentic and rush towards joy is not an easy thing, it’s an ongoing process. Someone asked me the other day when I found my authentic voice and I told them that I think what I have learnt is that who you are, your relationship to your partner and your art, has to be seen as a living thing that is constantly breathing and changing and growing and surprising you. Once you reach a point where you try and keep it, preserve it, then it goes dead. You always have to be curious and asking questions of yourself to define who you are, what you want and what you can give.” Sarandon is all about moving on, survival, never dwelling on the negative.

“Some people get really pissed off with bereavement. Others can’t get out of bed. I know when my dad passed away I was much more objective. There were things to be done and I felt I needed to do them.”

As the eldest of seven she was used to taking charge. “They all needed me and they all needed to get up and speak at the memorial and I really didn’t want to because I didn’t want it to be about me, so I didn’t speak. I was seeing my dad every weekend but he wasn’t living in my house. I think unless you are living with someone you can delude yourself.”

Her agent of 25 years, Sam Cohen, also recently passed away. “I did speak at the memorial. I was flattered they asked me. It was very difficult. You try not to just wail and at the same time you are incredibly disconnected.”

She is so disconnected she hasn’t crossed out dead people’s names from her phone book. She uses an old fashioned phone book. It’s somehow more vicious to cross them than to delete them from a mobile phone.

“I’m always telling my kids they should have a backup because if you lose your phone everything gets stolen. I look at my phone book and there is a whole history there. I don’t cross out the dead people. I think it’s kind of nice. I hold on to T-shirts and gifts that people who have passed away have given me.

A few months ago when she performed Ionesco’s Exit The King on Broadway, which is all about confronting death, she had turned her dressing room into a little shrine for people who had passed.

“I would talk to them before I went on for perspective. They were people I thought would like the play like Bob Altman and Paul Newman. I would say help me remember this is just a play and not take myself so seriously.”

Did she feel they talked backed? “No, but I did feel good having them there. I also had all new little souls, babies and pictures of my kids when they were little and new babies that had just been born.”

Does she believe that souls get passed on? “You mean reincarnation? Maybe. I’m not so sure about the recycling of souls situation, but the one thing that makes me believe that something goes on is that I felt that I had completely already known my children in some way shape or form before they were born. When my daughter (Eva) was about three she asked me when we’d first met, and I started to tell her the story of her birth, and she said no, I remember when I wanted to pick you as my mother. I remember when Jack had his first birthday and she was five, she said, Jack and I knew each other when we were the same age. She also said, every year I get younger and younger as I give away stuff, and I said what kind of stuff, and she said I get younger and lighter because I’m getting rid of bullshit. I went into her class at school and said what are you teaching her? And they said oh no, that’s just her.

“Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote the book about the five stages of dying and she wanted me to do a movie about her life. She had these spiritual friends. She saw people that had passed on and came back and talked to her. She said that kids had the easiest time passing on because they didn’t have so many attachments.’

I think she would have trouble leaving, I think she would hang on. “Absolutely. I’m not ready at all. I have at least another 40 years, but I think about dying all the time. How could you not? But I think I am manifesting this very interesting life right now.” Her eyes seem to ignite and become orbital. They miss nothing, take in everything, and it’s as if the more she thinks about death the more urgent life becomes, the more in the present she is.

She told me once that you are the protagonist in your own life. Meaning you are the one that makes things happen and you don’t have to be the victim. There’s not a whisker, a shadow, of victim energy about her. That’s why she never hit 40 and thought it’s over for a woman in Hollywood. The first time she played a mother she was 32 and that didn’t represent the milestone that it could have been. She doesn’t seem to look at things as milestones, more like opportunities to learn. Even pain she seems to cherish as a poetic experience.

Her relationship with Louis Malle sounds epically tortured. He was the director, she was the actress, he was used to being the driving force. And she had to surrender to be the one who was driven. “I learnt a lot from him because he was from France and older. I don’t regret any of the relationships I’ve had, even the ones that practically killed me.” She talks about sobbing for days and being humiliated, but never for long. “I always believe that lovers and certain people come into your life as well as certain jobs. It may not be clear at the time but they come for a reason. Exit The King – 120 nights meditating on death. That definitely changes you.”

So she thinks she knew her children from another life, did she know her lovers? She laughs a sparkly eyed laugh. “No. No.” And then concedes. “Maybe one, but I’m not going to say which one and I didn’t have that feeling of recognition when I met each of my children. When my children were born they were exactly the people they are now. Forget that nurture nature thing. I remember looking at my daughter. She could have been an alien. She was such a strong presence. She wasn’t like meeting me half way. She arrived, who she is.

“When Jack arrived he was completely different. I thought that was because he was a boy. And then when the other boy, Miles, came, he was completely different again. I remember Francine, who was the mother of Donald Sutherland’s children saying to me, ‘The way they take to the breast will tell you exactly who they are going to be…'” And how did they? “One of them was very interested in breasts. One of them just smiled.”

Were the boys more interested than the girls? “Not necessarily. Jack was very loud when he was born and came very quickly, and he’s still loud, very outgoing. Even when you couldn’t understand a thing he was saying he was introducing me to the maitre d’. He’s now studying film at USC and writing. He is a people person. He could be a union organiser. Jack is a lot like Tim. He likes going to parties. Whereas Miles is a lot more like me – over six people and I’m overwhelmed. I remember thinking no wonder no one gets along in our house, everyone is a leader in different ways. There are no followers.

“Miles has just done a CD, he is a musician. Both of them DJ at my club.” Miles is 17 and will be leaving to go to college shortly. Isn’t that called empty nest, and doesn’t that come with a syndrome? “Yes, liberation.” She says she is going to change everything and she is looking forward to “repatterning” herself.

“I have been living a wonderful life but I have to rediscover my voice. I have been a function of my family’s needs for such a long time.” Everyone thinks of Sarandon as dynamically outspoken, yet she’s better at speaking other people’s needs. “It doesn’t mean I’m not outspoken. It doesn’t mean I haven’t worked, but I have put them first. I have defined myself as a mother first, always checking the schedules. I was doing it with my siblings. My son said, ‘You are the glue that keeps the family together.’ And I’m sure an element of that will remain.”

It’s like her whole life she’s been trying to escape being the caretaker, the responsible one. She’s escaped into rebellious parts. On films she can push boundaries, be daring. Perhaps now she can incorporate that sense of daring into real life.

She left home to go to Catholic university in Washington DC. “I couldn’t wait to leave home. I was always shy but I knew there was something outside. That was the main

Yet she hadn’t been in college long before she got married. Why did she get married so young? “At that time you couldn’t live together if you weren’t married. He was a graduate student. I was 17 when I met him and slept with him when I was 19 and got married when I was 20. How backwards is that? I was a Catholic and I was living with my grandparents to save money.” Did she love him? “Oh yes, he was a dear man, and very instrumental. I felt very safe with him. He introduced me to black and white movies and poetry. There is a huge difference between a graduate student and a freshman.”

There’s almost romantic yearning when she talks about this first love, Chris Sarandon, whose name she kept. “It’s a very good name.” The marriage didn’t last because perhaps she wanted more than safety. “I think there was a certain point where I needed to go on to the next step and I needed something different. I didn’t know what it was at the time and we ended up being something else.” She goes on to explain how they both ended up having children and how her son Jack is the same age as his son Max. She describes it as if it’s a life that could have been hers. She describes it with nostalgia and distance in equal parts.

After her marriage broke down she had a kind of meltdown. It’s hard to explain exactly what triggered it, it seems to have been many things. Perhaps believing that life was going to be certain and safe and discovering it was not. At the time she decided she would get through it without any pharmaceutical help. She hates chemicals. “It worries me that people see pain as an alien thing. There won’t be any poetry if everyone is on such an even keel.”

One imagines that growing up Catholic influenced a lot of how she felt disappointment when love turned out not to conquer all, and also the way she sees marriage. She only got married once, and not to Eva’s father, director Franco Amurri. She fell pregnant in a miraculous accident. She had been told her endometriosis would mean she could never have children and she stopped taking the pill. She had not known Amurri long before they became parents. Their relationship was never meant to last. She met Tim Robbins on the set of Bill Durham in 1988. She never planned to marry him. “I don’t get the marriage thing. When people ask me to support gay marriage they are asking the wrong person.” Sarandon seems to rail against being a couple rather than an individual. Plus playing safe doesn’t exist for her.

“My daughter talks about getting married. She thinks it will be great, and a great party… My friend had a daughter who got married pretty young. She was about 23 and it was a huge wedding and she is a celebrity and her daughter is a celebrity and she said, ‘It’s a good first marriage.’ I thought fair enough, a few years and one child later she’s not married any more.” I think we can figure out that’s Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson but Sarandon does one of those cartoon smiles.

Did she think she would be with Tim forever ?
“i have no idea.” Cartoon smile disappears.

I wonder if the tattoo round her wrist, which looks like a ring of barbed wire, is a symbol for relationship torture. “No. It only looks like barbed wire. It says, ‘A new dawn, a new day’ to remind me that every day you come into the world you are born again a new person. I have a very large one on my back which I got during the filming of Lovely Bones. It’s my kids initials.”

Typical Sarandon. Never does things in the right age or order. She discovered tattoos in her sixties and has made tattoo sharing a family event.

“My son just got one and my daughter just got one together when I got this one on my wrist. She got Latin words for being present and being conscious written in typewriter script and my son got a Ganesh.”

So you all went together as a family? “No. Just me and my daughter, and my son was very angry that I got mine before his, but he couldn’t think what he wanted. I left after the matinee of Exit The King and met him at the tattoo place and went back for the evening show, so I was there for most of his tattoo.

“I had given him a little Ganesh when he graduated from high school and he was going to travel around Europe. He was afraid he was going to lose it. So he put a duplicate of it as a tattoo. Miles doesn’t have one yet but he will get one.”

Sarandon has never been able to be stereotyped. There is nothing rigid about her. Playing a grandmother in The Lovely Bones has not made her feel old or unsexy. “I think we have to revamp the idea of what it means to be a grandmother. This one is the anti granny.”

She is the only sexy funny thing in the movie and that is her purpose, to lift it, to stop it from being turgid and too tragic. “I loved the hair, and the outfits were fabulous. I had hair and make-up like that in those days and I wore a fall at the back. But hers was a gorgeous wig and the arc of my character is seen through her hair. In the end it’s limp and discombobulated. It was my own hair by then. She didn’t have time and with grief your maintenance just goes.”

Sarandon does not look self-consciously maintained. She looks good because she looks herself. Her career spans a huge range of characters. She was never compartmentalised. She always fought not to be diminished by a label.

“I think that’s true. Everything used to be over by the time you were 40. When I did Bill Durham I had just turned 40 and that was a great part.”

She played a baseball groupie and felt very sexy in that role, and it’s special to her because it’s when she first met Robbins. Does she still feel sexy? “Yes, I am sexy. Someone said to me recently do you think about ageing, and I think what’s the choice? I think a lot about what we don’t like aesthetically about women that are fighting ageing is fear manifesting. I don’t think you should try to look 22 when you are in your sixties. There is something odd about a woman who looks younger than she did 20 years ago. It’s so self-conscious. I’m not against anybody doing anything to themselves that makes them feel good, but I think aesthetically some fillers and stuff make people unrecognisable. It’s difficult to watch somebody’s face, to see someone who has lips that are unrecognisable. I think you are going against your own branding and I think there are a lot of people who have trusted the wrong people
“There are a lot of things that you can do that are fine, but when you get really into doing stuff you look at that person and you think, ‘Oh my God, that looks just like…. Oh my God, it is her.’ I’ve never had fillers, and how can you get botox when you’re an actor?”

Has she ever had anything done? “Yes, I had under my chin sucked out once. I think we have to be supportive of each other and if someone wants to get implants or tucks you hope that that will be fine and they will keep the essence of who they are and not go over the top.”

Does she have a regime to stay in shape? “I have a trainer for strength because I don’t want osteoporosis to come and I do gyrotonic when I can. Young actors ask me why is your skin so great, what is your product, and all I say is stop smoking, that’s the big one. And just not over indulging and being happy. Laughing does a lot for the face. Do the things you enjoy. Surround yourself with good people. Denying yourself is not good for the face. You can’t be a bitter angry person. Hatred is unsexy and not great for your skin.”

Interestingly that’s what’s written on her face, laughter lines but no scowling lines. There are lines of pleasure but no evidence of restraint. Nothing is pinched.

There has been talk of an Oscar nomination for Lovely Bones. “I would love that,” she says instantly without false modesty. She loves her work, but the beauty is however serious it is she doesn’t take it seriously. “Acting itself is really not that complicated. It’s surviving as a human being that’s difficult.”

At first glance Richard E. Grant appears to be licking the racing green leather walls of the lift in the Ivy Club. He is actually sniffing it. His olfactory powers are on turbo drive since he spent the last year creating and is about to launch his new unisexy perfume Jack.
He is glowing from the experience, that the anticipation of his first days on set as an upstairs character in Downton and a part in the juicily dysfunctional twentysomething comedy drama series Girls, and playing a narcissistic ostrich in the animated Khumba: A Zebra’s Tale. In fact he is looking splendid: tall lithe, sweeping hair and a large Union ‘Jack’ scarf. He wears the large grin of a person who can’t believe his good fortune. The cat who discovered his cream was full fat.
We meet on the day before he is to go on set for his Downton debut. ‘Four episodes,’ he says, looking savour it. Is he a Lady Mary lover? ‘I am an upstairs character and they’ve told me that I can’t say what I am for fear of my knees being removed. I was in Gosforth Park also written by Julian 12 years ago. I was a downstairs character, a footman. Now Julian Fellowes has promoted me to upstairs.’
Did he write it with him in mind? ‘You would have to ask him,’ he says looking constrained. I think he wants to tell me but he can’t. It just came out of the blue? ‘Yes,’ he says… Was he always hoping that Fellowes would write him a part in Downton?
‘It is the thing that my mother who is 84 has asked me on a monthly basis since it started. “When are you going on Downton? Why are you not in Downton and when will you be in it?” She always thought it was about time. All her friends have seen it. She is in Africa so it’s gone global. I spoke to her last week and told her she can tell her fellow bridge players it had come to pass. But you know, until you actually do it and it’s edited and comes out you are always slightly wary because you don’t know if your part will be cut.
‘I am always excited by a new job. That has never gone away and I think the day it does go away is the day you have to hang up your tights and put away your make-up. I am a Downton fan. I have watched it all the way.’
I try to make him tell me more about his part. Are you playing a vet? Isa the Labrador seems to have been around since pre-Titanic. ‘I will ask tomorrow if the dog is going to dog heaven but they’ve already got a vet. I can’t tell you any more.’
Do they give you the script in advance or just your character? ‘I have three scripts at the moment. The fourth one hasn’t been written yet.’ So he knows what’s happening to everybody, not just his character? ‘Yes I do and I can’t tell you, but it’s going to be good. It’s a bit like being the new boy at school. They’ve all been working on this for four years and then people from outside come in…’ He pulls a nervous face. ‘Word is that everybody has a good time. When you reach a certain vintage you already know quite a few of the actors. I was amused that somebody sent me a Google link the other day saying that I was a veteran actor, so there you are, I’m a veteran,’ he says savouring the word.
I’ve always known that Richard E. was special. He is complicated, tangible and at the same time elegantly distant. He was mesmerising on Richard E. Grant’s Hotel Secrets and the second series is coming up. ‘I loved the hotel series. The second series covers Hong Kong, Tokyo, Miami, New Orleans, Venice and Berlin. It did feel very risky at the beginning going literally into unscripted territory where I had to meet people and interview them.
‘My favourite was Heidi Fleiss when I had to interview her in Las Vegas about sex and sex scandals in hotels. She lives with 40 macaws and was extraordinary. In fact I love interviewing people. Being a nosey parker and being paid for it, brilliant.’
When I last interviewed Richard E. he bonded with my un-bondable cat, a ninja warrior of a cat who attacks all who come near her. In fact Richard E. Grant is possibly the only person from whom she has not drawn blood. I have always thought there was something cat like about him.
He says he coped with his hotel series flying around the world subjected to jet lag because ‘I am like a cat, I can sleep anywhere. Sitting upright in a chair.’
I don’t see him as a lap cat though, or as a dog, even though he had one. More of a cheetah. ‘He raises an eyebrow. I’ll go for anything that’s fast and can change its spots. Nobody really changes, do they? Your essential nature I think is unchangeable.
‘When I was doing My Fair Lady in Sydney I saw someone called Richard Clarke who I hadn’t seen since I was 12-years-old since they emigrated to Perth. We had remained pen friends for a year. We had not seen each other for four decades, before our voices had broken. And then I looked out of the lobby window and recognised the signature of his walk from a distance even though now he was a middle-aged man. We met and we talked. We started at six in the evening. Dawn came up and we were still talking. At some point he said, “You haven’t changed at all.”
‘And I thought oh, you hope that some barnacles of wisdom or something is going to accrue to you over the years. And he said, “No, I mean it in a complementary way. You still ask too many questions and you still talk too much.” And I felt the same about him. Essentially he was the same. I think unless something catastrophic happens to warp you off kilter, who you are is a meridian line’
I wonder if Richard E. Grant, 56, is the same as Richard E. at 12. I wonder if what happened to him at 10 traumatised him to the point of changing him completely. He woke from a doze in the back of the family car to see his mother having sex with one of his father’s friends in the front seat. Subsequently he watched his father slip into alcoholic despair, and then was bullied and brutalised by him.
‘It was traumatic, but I think if you are optimistic by nature that is something you don’t have any control over. That’s in your DNA. So I never ever thought that I was going to go under. I think it’s enormously lucky to have that in your life.’
One of his survival mechanisms was the catharsis of diary writing. His memoirs were wonderfully written and he wrote and directed the movie Wah-Wah based on his early life. He stills writes most days.
‘I write on an iPad because my handwriting is not very good and if I write it on paper it disappears because I’m a hoarder. I love stuff. I like to be surrounded by things that I’ve collected or have been given to me.’
Smell has always been the unlocker of memories, a key to him. How did the smell of Jack come about? ‘I was in the Caribbean two years ago and the designer Anya Hindmarsh saw me with my head in a gardenia bush and said what are you going to do about that? And I said do you mean psychiatrically? And she said no, have you thought of making a perfume? And I said it ahs been my dream.
‘She took out her iPhone and magic wanded a list of numbers of people to go and see. Roja Dove the perfumier told me that I have a very sharp sense of smell, possibly because I’ve never drunk or smoked.’
He insists that his intolerance for alcohol was not because he had to suffer the fallout and abuse from a father who became consumed with grief and alcoholism when his mother left him. ‘But because like Gaga says, I was Born That Way. When I was 18 I went to a doctor and found out that I have no enzymes that deal with alcohol. It’s like pouring poison down my throat. I have tried it and been violently ill for 24 hours, so it’s not worth it.’
He gets out a tiny bottle of Jack, which smells exotic, quirky, peppery, but oozing comfort, sexuality and elegance. Mesmerising and curious; a little like Grant himself.
‘So far I’ve had an amazing response. I wake up, live and breathe it. Having never done anything businessy in my life, never passed a maths exam, I think this has been the steepest learning curve for a man in his late 50s as it is possible to get.’
He is actually only 56. I wonder why he exaggerates his age? ‘I suppose you notice it so much because I’ve now lived four years longer than my father did, so every year feels like a bonus to me.’
A pause, a sigh. ‘He drank himself to death with unrequited love for my mother.’ He says this with surprising compassion. His father, Henrik Esterhuysen, was Minister of Education Swaziland.
His drunk father would be cruel, telling him he was ugly and untalented. At one point fired bullets at him that narrowly missed his head. ‘He wasn’t himself when he was drunk. I have come to terms with all that now. You forgive as you get older.’
Surely he missed his mother and he didn’t think oh it’s for the best I’m living with an alcoholic abusive father? ‘No, but the thing that really helped me through it all was writing a diary. Being involved in plays and having a puppet theatre. It was a hobby that was all so engrossing. It enabled me to be on my own and be content to be on my own. And in retrospect that gives you a sense of yourself and your own value and self-possession.’
I always think of Richard E. Grant as a composed person, fiercely independent and a loner. I’m not sure exactly why I have a sense of that. I always imagined him as an only child. He in fact has a brother from whom he is estranged.
‘I think I am an only child in the sense that my brother (Stuart) went to a different school and we had separate friends and I felt like I was an only child. I haven’t had any contact with him for years. I last saw him at my father’s funeral. I don’t know what he does, where he lives or anything about him.’
Is he not curious? ‘Absolutely zero interest.’
He is curious about everybody, why not him? ‘Because if you feel someone harbours resentment towards you or ill will you don’t gravitate towards them. That’s just animal instinct. It’s not something I’m going to poke my nose around. Leave sleeping animosity lying.’
I have read that his brother complained that Richard E. turned up at his father’s funeral with orange hair – it was for a part in a play – and lobbed him a few insults. It sounds like there has been a lifetime of murky discord. Has his mother never tried to get them to patch things up? ‘No. I think she understood. More than anything a parent knows if two children don’t get on.
‘My mother has been married to her second husband for 38 years. She loves gardening, she loves dogs.’ About 15 years ago when he was thinking about making the movie he had a period of depression where he found it hard to get out of bed. He went to a therapist recommended by Steve Martin who he met on the set of LA Story and his therapist asked him how he would feel if his mother died and urged him to make contact. He sent her a fax asking if she could explain what happened on the day he saw her from the back seat of the family car.
She wrote an 18-page letter about what it was like to be a woman in a colonial set-up with a strict hierarchy. She had no idea that his father had become an alcoholic mourning her loss. It is easy to see why he fled to London to drama school. Swaziland remains bitter sweet to him.
He met his wife, voice coach Joan Washington, when she taught a class in 1983. They were married in 1986, the year before he was to star in one of the greatest cult films ever made, Withnail And I. His performance as Withnail remains one of the most brilliantly poised and cleverly observed recreations of a drunk ever to hit celluloid. He went on to win acclaim in How To Get Ahead In Advertising, The Age Of Innocence, The Player, Gosford Park and as Michael Heseltine in The Iron Lady.
His contacts book is pretty impressive. He has worked with just about anybody who matters and one of the actors who matters most to him is Helena Bonham Carter.
‘We have been friends for 22 years. I’ve worked with her twice, first on Twelfth Night and then on Keep The Aspidistra Flying. She’s one of the most innately funny people you could ever wish to work with. When she starts laughing it’s a giggle box you can’t resist. She’s as smart as a whip too. Nothing passes her. I adore her. She is also very very good. Did you see her as Enid Blyton? Her portrayal of this monstrous woman was extraordinary.’
When I ask him about Khumba the animated tale of the zebra who is only half striped and its metaphors with wanting to be accepted he tells me that he hasn’t seen it and he can’t remember much about it.
‘I went into a studio, no make-up, no costume. Everyone in the studio on their own with a sound engineer. It’s cheaper that way because it’s cheaper to fly a sound engineer than some actor who has to be picked up from an airport and put in a chichi hotel. It does feel like a fraudulent job sometimes when everybody else at the coal face working, drawing, doing all the colouring, all that stuff they do in animation. They give you a rough sketch of a character and you only see the bits you are in.’
He doesn’t even know whether Liam Neeson, who is the voice of the one-eyed lion, has an Irish or an American accent. Perhaps he needs to be finessed by Joan Washington. I wonder has Richard ever had any voice lessons from his wife?
‘Yes. My first television job called Sweet Sixteen in 1983 playing a Gloucestershire yokel, and later on I needed a southern American accent for Suddenly, Last Summer with Natasha Richardson. All I can say is don’t do it. It’s the life lesson of marriage. It’s a little bit like getting a driving lesson from anyone you are close to. They are not going to be as patient as they could be with somebody else. That’s par for the course.’ Family and loyalty are very important to him. The scars of his childhood meant he grew up thinking he would be betrayed or abandoned.
He says he misses his daughter Olivia, now 25, even though she only lives a mile away from him in Richmond. They talk every day. ‘Olivia has graduated in creative writing from East Anglia and has been working as a production assistant on four films including Philomena, The Invisible Woman, Posh about the Bullingdon Club and The Theory Of Flight about Stephen Hawkins.’
Recently he had a fire in his house in Richmond. ‘I have a flat roof on the garage at the bottom of my garden and it was being repaired. The roofers let a blowtorch on a fir tree, which went up in flames, and everything caught fire. Fire engines and everything were called. I was terrified of the whole thing. I thought I was going to lose everything but the fire brigade who are literally ten minutes from my house arrived so quickly and were brilliant. I was home alone and I saw it from my study upstairs. Suddenly the tree was on fire. It was in the summer so there was a hosepipe in the garden so I got that out before the Fire Brigade arrived.’
He gives a slight shudder. Possessions collected over the years, the memories of the family home, all very important to him.
He misses Joan when she is away. Currently she is voice coaching on a film in Toronto. She only ever does big films. This one is called Crimson Peak with Tom Hiddlestone and Jessica Chastain.
How has he managed longevity in love? ‘I have no idea… Well, we started talking to each other in 1983 and that conversation has not stopped. It’s a 30 year conversation.’
The life of an actor is by its nature rollercoaster high then dry. ‘Yes, we’ve carried on despite all of that. Her work is consistent. She consistently works with the best people. And her job absolutely dovetails with mine. She understands how actors operate, which is a good thing.’
He is not glib when he says all of this. There have certainly been some bad times. When they first married she suffered miscarriages and their first daughter Tiffany died after half an hour of life. ‘That was 27 years ago. It feels like a long time ago but I still think about it because the road to where we live goes past the cemetery in which our first daughter is buried. I pass it every day so you can’t not think about it. I think you don’t get over something, you go round it. You accept it because that’s the nature of how you live otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get through a day.’
Was it one of those things that if it didn’t break you as a person and as a relationship it made you stronger? ‘Exactly it does, you know, children and whatever happens to them. It’s a thing I’ve seen so often in partnership that causes discord and it shouldn’t.’
More so than having twentysomething lovers on the set of Girls? He laughs: ‘They are very special to me, the cast of Girls. After all, I am a veteran,’ he says, relishing his status with a naughty glint.
The creator of Girls, Lena Dunham, saw Withnail And I and wrote the part especially for him. ‘Lena Dunham is extraordinarily bright and disarming. She said she wrote a part for me after she’d seen Withnail. They haven’t killed me off. There’s a possibility I could come back. I am an older English gentleman who meets Jemima Kirk in rehab. I am a recovering cocaine addict and she is a recovering multi-addict.’
And they have a twisted dysfunctional romance. ‘That’s a very good way of putting it. More in my head I think than hers, in character of course. It’s alarming when you go on set and they are all the age of my daughter and I am older than most of their parents.’
He promises he doesn’t think about the ageing process too much. ‘Not like Bruce Robinson who wrote Withnail who constantly talks to me about how many Christmases he thinks he’s got left. He’s 67.’
Does your mother talk about how many Christmases she’s got left? ‘Never. No. She just gets on with it. Bruce likes to indulge in a maudlin cynicism with me on the phone.’
Richard E. Grant couldn’t look more alive. His skin vibrates with its own glow. His eyes seem to have a constant sparkle. And besides he eats Christmas pudding every month. ‘And then I have a slice of it for leftovers fried for breakfast the next day.’
How is it that he isn’t 25 stone? ‘I have been running around chasing my tail all my life. I think that’s it.’ And with that he needs to leave on urgent perfume business and no doubt more tail chasing.

Jack launches exclusively at Liberty on April 2 and online at www.jackperfume.co.uk.
Khumba: A Zebra’s Tale is out on April 11.